Makueni County

BOX 6.3

Integrating and institutionalizing citizen engagement: The example of Makueni County

Through participatory development, Makueni County has transformed itself from a net recipient of food aid to food self-sufficiency. This was acknowledged by the Cabinet Secretary (CS) for Devolution and the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands during a structured peer learning exercise organized for governors and their technical teams in Makueni. “It is amazing that we can come for a visit to Makueni County and be gifted with food to take back. Previously, as the government, whenever we heard about Makueni, we would always think we needed to provide relief food,” remarked the CS. The county has implemented impactful and value-formoney projects that cut across health, water, and agriculture, endorsed through public participation.

How has the county been able to achieve this? Development projects in Makueni undergo a citizen prioritization and validation process through a structured multiple-tier decision-making model that moves from the village level upward, to village clusters, subwards, wards, and finally the county forum. At each of these levels, a development committee comprising 11 citizens is selected by the community to represent the project priorities identified by the community at the next level of engagement. County officials conduct a technical evaluation on the feasibility of the projects before citizens arrive at final decisions on priority projects.

By shifting decision-making power to the citizens on the kind of projects they want to implement, Makueni County has significantly altered patronage politics in which elites exchange public resources and material goods for electoral support. Although the County Assembly members in charge of the wards approve the budget presented by the County Executive, it is hard for them to override citizens’ decisions on the ward-level budget and introduce new projects given the elaborate participation structure that logically traces how projects emerged from the village level upward. At the county forum, which is attended both by governors and members of County Assemblies (MCAs), the citizens present their ward-level projects to the governor, who acknowledges by signing these as a true record of the citizens’ choices. Citizens are also given an opportunity to verify that the investment projects reflect what they agreed upon.

Assigning a given portion of the county budget to citizens’ decisions enables citizens to budget with a specific ceiling in mind, which manages their expectations and reduces the wish lists of projects that are often presented to governments operating on limited budgets. This builds the credibility of the budget process, resulting in increased trust between the county and citizens.

Citizens are further engaged in budget execution through democratically elected project management committees (PMCs), comprising community representatives who oversee the implementation of projects. This has greatly improved accountability in the use of county funds as well as of the county officials.

“The people of Makueni County do not just give us views; they must approve the projects and ensure that they have been completed to the people’s desire before the county can process the payment,” said Makueni County Governor Kivutha Kibwana.

During the public forum for the FY2020/21 budget, citizens took the county officials to task over what they termed slow implementation of some water projects. The citizens had also engaged their MCAs to report the slow execution by the County Executive, and the MCAs were able to make follow-up demands on the County Executive to address the matter. The County Executive responded by setting up a rapid results implementation committee comprising subward and ward administrators, subcounty administrators, and department heads. This committee evaluates how the budget is being implemented, reviews the progress of projects, identifies challenges, and addresses them to ensure projects are completed within the stipulated deadlines.

Source: World Bank 2020a.

and CA members in 2013 and 2017. Elections have been hotly contested and, as detailed in box 6.4, governors and MCAs are consistently perceived to be more important than the members of the national parliament (Cheeseman et al. 2019). Citizens have shown themselves ready to vote out people occupying county political posts: less than half of incumbent governors retained their seats during