11.2 Makueni County Project Management System dashboard, 2019

and insurance at K Sh 214.2 million (4.4 percent). Expenditures on repair and maintenance grew extremely fast (40 percent per year) but remained extremely low (1 percent of current expenditures) in the surveyed fiscal period. Repair and maintenance are particularly important asset management actions to ensure that both inherited and the K Sh 7 billion in new assets acquired since devolution function well and effectively provide local services.

Spending on acquisition of assets increased dynamically (17 percent per year), grew to K Sh 3 billion in the 2016/17 fiscal year, and then went back to the regular range (table 11.3). As a result, the share of development expenditures within total expenditures increased slightly, from below 19 percent in 2013/14 to 24 percent in 2017/18. The 44 percent share of development expenditures in 2017/18 is high by international comparison (40 percent benchmark), and maybe it is a result of the delayed completion of construction projects in previous years. The county spent on infrastructure investments nearly K Sh 2 billion more than its revenues generated and accounted a huge K Sh 2 billion budget deficit in 2016/17. This could be an accounting or classification error, since the reserves from previous years generated by budget surpluses have not been reported.

Makueni County exemplifies a massive transformative program to enhance infrastructure and services; since devolution it has initiated 2,233 projects, of which 1,660 are completed, 346 are ongoing, and 33 are delayed, while 166 were in the procurement cycle in 2018. The county also made a big step toward improving project management and transparency by developing a platform-based Project Management System (Makueni PMS) with up-to-date reporting results in web postings. Makueni stands out among the 47 Kenyan counties with its transparent and well-performing PMS accessible to the public online (see the screenshot in figure 11.2).

Figure 11.3 summarizes the development results since the 2013 devolution that envisions a total of K Sh 12 billion in budgeted projects and about K Sh 6.5 billion completed over the five fiscal years. The main lessons include

FIGURE 11.2

Makueni County Project Management System dashboard, 2019