Four Things County Strategy Still Gets Wrong

1. CIDPs are treated as documents, not instruments

The CIDP is the most important strategic instrument a county has. It is the legally required five year plan that should set the trajectory for the budget cycle, the sector plans, and the performance contracting underneath.

In practice, most CIDPs read as inventories of aspirations. They list projects without sequencing them. They list outcomes without costing them. They list partners without specifying terms. They are produced through a participation process that often runs faster than the analysis the process is supposed to inform. They are tabled, they are passed, and they are filed.

The CIDP should be doing four things at once. It should anchor the budget. It should sequence priorities. It should pre-allocate fiscal space. It should commit to measurable outcomes. In counties where it does these things, the budget improves immediately. In counties where it does not, the annual budget process becomes a separate exercise that recreates priorities from scratch every year.

The fix is not legislative. It is methodological. CIDPs need to be built around fiscal envelopes that the county can credibly defend, with outcome targets that the county can credibly measure. Anything beyond that is rhetoric.

2. Counties plan for functions they do not have

The Fourth Schedule of the Constitution divides functions between national and county governments. The list is clear. Counties do not control monetary policy, foreign affairs, national highways, national grid energy, national curriculum, higher education policy, immigration, or national security. They have specific powers in health, agriculture, county roads, urban planning, trade, pre-primary education, and a defined set of other functions.

Many CIDPs blur this line. They include strategic objectives for outcomes the county cannot directly deliver. They commit to investments in functions the county does not control. They cite indicators that depend on national-level decisions. The effect is twofold. Underinvestment in core devolved functions. Overpromise on outcomes that depend on others.

The strongest CIDPs we have seen across our county engagement do the opposite. They are sharply scoped to what the county can deliver. They name partnerships with national entities for where the county influences but does not control. They do not promise outcomes the county cannot deliver. This discipline is what separates credible county strategy from compliance documents.

3. Own source revenue is the missing strategic instrument

County finance has been dominated for twelve years by one figure. The equitable share. Conditional grants matter. Donor finance matters. But the equitable share is the financial centre of gravity for almost every county.

This dominance is itself a strategic vulnerability. Counties that depend on a single revenue source dependent on a national formula have limited fiscal control. They cannot shape their development pace. They are exposed to national fiscal cycles. They cannot price local economic activity in a way that influences it.

Own source revenue is the strategic instrument that closes this gap, and it is the instrument counties have underused most consistently. Property rates collection is a fraction of potential across most counties. The Valuation Roll in many counties is decades out of date. Single business permits are issued without enforcement infrastructure. Market fees are collected informally. Land rates exemptions are negotiated case by case rather than under transparent policy.

Building OSR is not a glamorous reform. It is the most undervalued strategic move available to county leadership. A county that doubles its OSR base over a CIDP cycle has done more for its development pace than any single donor programme can deliver. The technical work is well understood. Updated valuation rolls. Geocoded property registers. Permit issuance and enforcement systems. Transparent rate cards. Predictable collection cycles. None of this requires legislation. It requires sustained operational focus, which most counties have not invested in.

4. Monitoring and evaluation was the layer never built

The CIDP names indicators. The ADP names outcomes. The budget names allocations. The Controller of Budget reports on execution. The Auditor General reports on compliance. None of these together amount to performance management.

Most counties do not have a working M&E system at the standard the framework implies. Sectoral data is collected unevenly. Citizen-facing reporting is patchy. Outcome data lags or does not exist. The instruments that should let a county leadership team know whether the CIDP is delivering, mid-cycle, are usually absent.

The cost is large. Without M&E, course correction is impossible. Without outcome data, citizens cannot hold counties to account. Without performance evidence, donors cannot allocate confidently. Without verification, the difference between high-performing and low-performing counties is hard to substantiate at scale.

This is the most important investment area for the next phase of devolution. M&E is not a side project. It is the layer that turns plan and budget into performance. The counties that build it first will look very different at year fifteen than the counties that do not.

Where Counties Are Getting It Right

The picture is not uniformly difficult. Across the twelve years, a number of counties have built capability that demonstrates the framework can work. The lessons from those counties matter.

First, alignment discipline. The strongest counties run a tight loop between CIDP, ADP, sector plans, and annual budget. The numbers in the budget can be traced to outcomes in the CIDP. The CIDP outcomes can be traced to the constitutional functions and the local development context. Nothing in the budget is detached from the plan. This sounds basic. It is rare.

Second, citizen-facing reporting. The best counties report transparently to their residents on what was budgeted, what was spent, and what was delivered. This is not just compliance with the Public Participation provisions. It is a discipline that improves both performance and political legitimacy.

Third, institutional continuity. The counties that perform consistently do so because they protect the technical layer through political transitions. The County Public Service Board functions as a credible employer. Senior technical positions are filled on merit. Sector heads serve through electoral cycles. Strategy survives changes in leadership.

Fourth, focused OSR build. The counties with the strongest fiscal position have been the ones that invested in OSR infrastructure deliberately. Updated valuation rolls. Geocoded property registers. Permit enforcement. Predictable collection. These counties have more strategic space than the average.

None of these counties have solved devolution. All of them have decided to do the operational work the framework expects but does not enforce. That is the differentiator.