[Insight]
What Assessing All 47 Counties Taught Us About Devolution
[Insight]
What Assessing All 47 Counties Taught Us About Devolution
Opening Perspective
Twelve years into devolution, the Kenyan debate about counties remains stubbornly ideological. Defenders point to visible dispensaries and roads. Critics point to audit queries and wage bills. Both argue from anecdote. There is, however, a body of evidence that argues from data: the independent capacity and performance assessments conducted across all 47 counties under the Kenya Devolution Support Programme, and the successive annual assessments of counties and municipalities under the Kenya Urban Support Programme. ACAL has delivered these assessments repeatedly, through structured tools, field verification, and financier-grade quality assurance, with billions of shillings in performance grants riding on the results. Few organisations anywhere have looked at the machinery of Kenyan devolution this closely, this often. This is what the evidence actually says.
What Is Actually Converging on the Counties
The assessment architecture is worth understanding, because it is quietly one of devolution's most effective policy instruments. Counties are evaluated against minimum conditions, the non-negotiable basics of lawful public administration: budgets enacted on time, financial statements submitted, procurement plans in place, functioning internal audit. Meeting them unlocks eligibility for performance grants. Beyond the minimums, counties are scored against performance standards spanning public financial management, planning, human resource management, civic participation, and monitoring and evaluation. Scores translate into grant allocations, so the assessment is not an academic exercise. It is a pricing mechanism for institutional capability, applied uniformly across all 47 counties, year after year.
That repetition is what makes the evidence valuable. One assessment is a snapshot. A decade of them is a longitudinal dataset on how subnational institutions form, improve, stagnate, and occasionally regress.
The difference between counties that deliver and counties that do not is not money, geography, or politics. It is whether the plan, the budget, and the measurement system are connected to each other.
ACAL Advisory Team
Public Sector Advisory
Key Insights
1. The performance gap is institutional, not financial
The most consistent finding across assessment cycles is that counties with broadly similar fiscal envelopes produce dramatically different results. Equitable share allocations are formula-driven and relatively predictable, yet the spread in performance scores is wide and persistent. What separates the top of the table from the bottom is not revenue. It is whether core systems exist and function: a planning unit that produces usable documents, a budget process connected to those plans, procurement that follows its own calendar, and internal audit that management actually answers. Devolution's critics blame money and its defenders demand more of it. The data says the binding constraint is institutional.
2. Conditionality changed county behaviour faster than training ever did
Years of capacity-building workshops moved county systems slowly. Attaching grant money to minimum conditions moved them quickly. The share of counties meeting basic statutory requirements rose visibly across assessment cycles once eligibility, and money, depended on it. The mechanism matters for everyone designing county-facing programmes: counties respond to priced incentives with verification attached, far more reliably than to sensitisation. This is also why the assessment model has been replicated across urban grants and climate finance programmes.
3. The single best predictor of delivery is the plan-budget-measurement link
Counties that score well share one structural feature: their county integrated development plan, their annual budget, and their monitoring framework describe the same activities. Weak counties hold all three documents, but they describe three different worlds, a visionary plan, an incremental budget, and an M&E report reconstructed after the fact. Where the three connect, projects are completed and reported. Where they do not, spending occurs but delivery is untraceable. Any partner trying to judge a county quickly should ask one question: can it trace a line from plan to budget line to completion report?
4. Performance is sticky, but it is not destiny
County rankings show real persistence at both ends of the table, which is what institutional capability theory predicts: systems compound. But the assessment record also documents genuine climbers, counties that moved from failing minimum conditions to strong performance within a few cycles. The climbers share a recognisable playbook: a stable technical core in the treasury and planning departments, early investment in fixing audit findings, and political leadership that treated the assessment as a management tool rather than an external imposition. Improvement is a choice, and the record proves it is available.
5. The assessment machinery itself is now national infrastructure, and it needs stewardship
Kenya's uniform, repeated, independently verified county assessment system is rare internationally, and it is the reason performance-based financing works here at all. It is also under strain: multiple programmes now assess the same counties on overlapping criteria, and assessment fatigue is real. Harmonising frameworks while protecting independence and rigour is the unglamorous reform that would keep this instrument, and every financing stream built on it, credible for the next decade.
What This Means
For county governments. The path up the table is documented and replicable. Fix minimum conditions first, they are cheap and unlock money. Build the plan-budget-measurement link second, it is the capability every financier reads. Treat each assessment cycle as a free diagnostic from the outside world.
For national government and policymakers. The evidence supports neither romanticism nor repeal. Devolution's delivery problem is concentrated, institutional, and responsive to priced incentives. Extending the conditional grant model, and harmonising the assessment burden, would do more for county performance than either more money or more oversight.
For development partners. County-level programming succeeds or fails on counterparty capability, and the assessment record is the best due diligence instrument available. Partners who design around it, and invest in the institutional layer it measures, consistently see better absorption than those who treat all 47 counties as interchangeable.
The Implications for ACAL's Clients
This evidence base exists because ACAL built much of it. The firm has delivered the annual capacity and performance assessments under the Kenya Devolution Support Programme across all 47 counties, and successive annual performance assessments of 45 counties and 79 municipalities under the second Kenya Urban Support Programme, work spanning tool design, nationwide field operations, and financier-grade verification.
For counties, that experience translates into precise institutional diagnostics and improvement programmes aimed at the capabilities the assessments price. For national agencies, assessment design and harmonisation. For development partners, county counterparty due diligence and performance-based programme architecture grounded in what a decade of data says actually moves.
Closing Perspective
Twelve years of devolution have produced an evidence base worthy of the experiment, and it tells a more useful story than either side of the political debate. Counties are not uniformly failing or succeeding. They are diverging, along a line drawn by institutional choices that the data identifies precisely. The difference between counties that deliver and counties that do not is not money, geography, or politics. It is whether the plan, the budget, and the measurement system are connected to each other. That is fixable, county by county, and the counties that fix it will define devolution's second decade.
Strategic Insights That Drive Business Success
Strategic Insights That Drive Business Success
Strategic Insights That Drive Business Success
