Makueni County's Multi-Tier Participatory Budgeting Model

Kenya's 2010 constitution devolved budgeting to 47 new counties and required public participation under the 2012 Public Finance Management Act. After early consultations under Makueni's first governor, Kivutha Kibwana (elected 2013), suffered from elite capture and low turnout, the county redesigned its process from FY2015/16 into a structured six-tier cascade: Village Peoples' Forums (over 3,000 of them, each with a non-hierarchical 11-member committee), Village Clusters, Sub-Wards, Wards, Sub-Counties, and a final County Forum of around 1,000 delegates, supported by the World Bank's Kenya Accountable Devolution Program.
World Bank data for FY2016/17 record 3,867 participatory meetings, over 350,000 participants engaged across the cycle, and 32% of the county's development budget (Kshs 823 million) allocated through the process, funding projects such as 84 medium-size earth dams built without land-purchase disputes because communities had already agreed to the sites. Makueni's own-source revenue grew from KSh 189 million in FY2013/14 to KSh 1.291 billion in FY2024/25, which the county attributes in part to the trust built through citizen engagement, and in August 2018 the Council of Governors, with World Bank, UKAID and USAID support, brought all 47 county governors to Makueni to study the model.
The World Bank's own working paper cautions that Makueni's results "should not be considered a best practice that can be readily replicated," given how much depended on sustained political commitment from a single reformist governor; commentary at the time noted Kibwana faced an impeachment attempt from assembly members seeking more control over budget allocations. The same research documents that citizens systematically prioritise visible, immediate needs (classrooms, water points, dispensaries) over longer-term strategic investment, that rural participants often had limited feedback on which of their prioritised projects were actually funded, and that Makueni's own reported participation and budget-share figures have varied significantly by year and source, so any single headline number should be read alongside its specific fiscal year.

Read the full analysis: https://makueni.go.ke