Concerns about inequalities in Kenya were among the major drivers of constitutional reforms, culminating in the 2010 Constitution.
Devolution was one of the mechanisms that was intended to address these concerns. It has stimulated a lot of interest in government spending since 2013, in part because people believe that devolution will lead to more equitable patterns of development across the country. However, this focus on the counties ignores equally important questions about the distribution of resources controlled by the national government. In this article, I examine the question of how national resources, particularly for capital projects, are distributed and why they are distributed in this way. Is the current approach equitable?
For the first time in 2016-17, Treasury released an itemised budget, with details of individual projects under each ministry and government department. This was a major step forward in terms of transparency. This has created an opportunity for the public to assess how the capital budget is distributed geographically, and to ask whether this is fair, by comparing budget data to data on access to services.
Our analysis focussed on two key areas — roads and water. The budget did not give geographical details of where the projects were to be implemented, but we can use project names to link them to certain counties or regions. For roads, we looked at specific projects by county and region and for the water sector, we looked at the regions covered by the Water Service Boards. So, what do we learn about equity from this analysis?
First, we have a big data challengethat makes it difficult to know what infrastructure deficits we are addressing. For example, the roads data available does not indicate which national roads are already paved and those that are not. We had to use data on county roads to estimate road access in the country.
In roads, a substantial proportion ( 56 per cent) of the roads capital budget is spent on what seems to be national projects such as Low Volume Seal Roads that cannot be categorised under a county or a region. For the remaining budget, the largest proportion of county-specific project spending was in two counties, Nairobi and Mombasa. In fact, 38 per cent of allocations on all the projects that we could categorise under the counties were in the two counties. At a broader regional level, Nairobi and the Coast regions take up almost half of the budget at 47 per cent.
How do these allocations compare to access measures? We look at this by comparing road access to area and population. Nairobi county has one kilometer of paved road for every 0.5km square of land, while Isiolo has a kilometre of paved road for every 15,500km square of land. In terms of population, Nairobi still has the best access with 3,300 people having access to a kilometre of paved road compared to over 222,000 people per km of paved road in Homa Bay. Therefore, on average, it seems that the counties with good access are the areas where the government is investing most on road infrastructure.
In the water sector, the picture is the same. the Athi Water Service Board region, which includes Nairobi and Kiambu counties, has the lowest share of people with poor access to water at six per cent.
However, it is allocated 32 per cent of the resources in the water development budget. Only the Rift Valley Water Service Board region has a higher allocation, which is mostly driven by the huge investment in the Itare Dam. These two regions take up 83 per cent of the budget, although they only account for only 24 per cent of people without good water access. Does this seem fair?
The presentation of individual capital projects in the 2016-17 budget is an advance in opening up the discussion on distribution of development across the county.
However, the lack of clear criteria for distribution and limited information on various projects still hampers the ability of Parliament and the public to engage in deliberation on the allocation of funds to certain parts of the country.
Kinuthia is a research analyst with IBP Kenya