Learning By Doing: Toward Better County Budgets in 2014/15

Learning By Doing: Toward Better County Budgets In 2014/15

Publisher	The Institute for Social Accountability (TISA)
Year of Publication
Category	Papers and Articles Policies and Guidelines
County	All/General
Description	As Kenyas county governments complete their first budget process under the 2010 Constitution, and begin the 2014/15 process, it is time to take stock. To be sure, counties faced a number of challenges in budgeting this year due to a compressed time schedule, inadequate support from national government, and limited capacity. Our goal in this paper is not to point fingers or assign blame, but to encourage learning as we go into the next budget cycle. It is only through understanding what did not work in this most recent process that we can ensure a better process going forward. Working together, IEA, TISA, IBP, WALINET, World Vision Kenya, ARTICLE 19, and I Choose Life Africa analyzed a number of 2013/14 budgets, with a specific focus on the budgets of 5 counties where we work: Laikipia, Busia, Homa Bay, Uasin Gishu and Nairobi. However, the challenges and recommendations discussed are relevant for many counties. In this synthesis paper, we highlight twelve major challenges in these budgets, and offer twelve recommendations for resolving them. We have included a summary of the 12 recommendations at the beginning of the brief. We urge all counties to resolve these issues in the 2014/15 budget cycle, which has already begun. This analysis will be complemented by a longer report exploring the key issues in each county, as well as the publication of an easy to use tool for citizens to analyze their own county budgets. We offer one important note on the specific budgets we analyzed. We based our analysis on budgets that were provided to us by county executive officers in each county before December of 2013. In many counties, there were multiple versions of budgets circulating, and these budgets may also have been revised since we completed our analysis. It is therefore possible that different versions of the budget have different information. Nevertheless, we take the versions we were provided to be the publicly available versions at the time we conducted our analysis.
Tags	Public Finance
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