Client Context

Kenya is classified as a water-scarce country, and the wider Horn of Africa faces a compounding problem: rainfall is becoming less reliable at precisely the moment demand for water is rising fastest. Surface water systems, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, respond to drought within a single season. Groundwater responds far more slowly, which makes aquifers the region’s most important buffer against climate variability and its most consequential blind spot. Groundwater is increasingly recognised as vital to climate resilience, food security, public health, and sustainable livelihoods across Africa, yet the science required to manage it well is concentrated in a small number of institutions.

The Regional Centre on Groundwater Resources exists to close that gap. Its vision is to be the premier centre in groundwater research and capacity building, and its work spans state-of-the-art aquifer characterisation, including the peaceful application of nuclear and isotope technology in water resource management, a capability few institutions on the continent hold. It sits under the Ministry of Water, Sanitation and Irrigation and operates within the Horn of Africa Groundwater for Resilience Project, a World Bank-financed regional programme, which places its mandate beyond Kenya’s borders.

By the close of its 2018 to 2022 plan, the Centre faced the question every ambitious research institution eventually confronts: whether its strategy, structure, and resourcing were adequate to the role the region now needed it to play.

The Challenge

The assignment carried two distinct disciplines that had to inform each other rather than run in parallel. The evaluation had to establish, honestly, what the previous strategic period had delivered against mandate, and the new Plan had to be built on those findings rather than around them.

That is harder than it sounds for a research and training institution. Research outputs do not convert neatly into performance indicators. Capacity building produces value that materialises years later, in institutions other than the one that delivered the training. A centre with a regional mandate must demonstrate results across countries whose water sectors differ in structure, capability, and data availability. Conventional strategic planning frameworks, built for service delivery organisations with countable outputs, tend to distort this kind of institution rather than describe it.

The Centre also faced a structural question the evaluation could not avoid. Its ambition, to be a regional and global knowledge hub for groundwater science, technology, and innovation, requires research capability, training infrastructure, partnerships, and sustainable financing operating together. An institution can be scientifically excellent and institutionally fragile at the same time, and the Plan had to address whether the organisational set-up and capacity were adequate to deliver the mandate before it committed the Centre to a more demanding one.

Our Approach

ACAL structured the engagement so that evaluation findings drove strategy formulation rather than sitting beside it as a separate deliverable. The end-term review examined the Centre’s vision, mission, and strategic objectives for alignment with its actual mandate, then tested strategies, objectives, and Key Result Areas through a consultative process with those responsible for delivering them. Institutional capacity and organisational structure were assessed for adequacy, and stakeholder engagement surfaced the gaps the next Plan needed to address. Strategy development then applied a methodology grounded in directional analysis of the Centre’s operations and its integration as a research, training, and innovation centre, supported by a needs assessment identifying critical challenges and growth opportunities, an evaluation of water sector trends and emerging issues to define strategic options, and a market assessment of avenues for growth in research and training. Structured analytical tools, including PESTEL, SWOT, VRIO, and stakeholder analysis, underpinned the positioning work, and the draft Plan was validated with stakeholders in workshop before finalisation, launch, and handover.