County governments are seeing the wealth of expertise in their county and pulling individuals to lead various dockets in the county governments.
Over the last week I have been travelling around the country and interacting with county governments on various assignments. What has become clear is that county governments are beginning to truly appreciate the power they have to guide development in their counties.
Devolution is reorganising power dynamics at county level in several ways.
The first is that devolution seems to be engendering brain-gain to counties. Professionals from private sector and development agencies are now working as technical staff in counties. This is due to both push and pull factors.
On one hand, county governments are seeing the wealth of expertise in their county and pulling individuals to lead various dockets in the county governments.
Secondly, as professionals interact with county governments, they begin to get excited about how they could contribute to the development of the regions in which they work and push themselves into county structures. This confluence of factors is creating a situation where county need for expertise meets the willingness of professionals to work in the county, for the benefit of the county.
Thirdly, counties have learnt from the first phase of devolution and county structures are strengthening, which has implications for numerous players.
The first is that stronger structures at county level mean development partners must align their funding and programs with County Integrated Development Plans (CIDP). No longer are donors coming in with thematic areas and priorities with which counties must comply; it is now the other way around.
Secondly, counties are becoming increasingly aware of the power of the private sector in their counties and are taking steps to make the private sector environment positive and enabling.
There is a willingness in many county governments to engage with the private sector on what county governments can do to build private sector activity in their jurisdictions with a focus on job creation and income growth.
To be clear these dynamics are not unfolding evenly across counties, but this is the general direction of the momentum being generated at county level. For example, counties are not interested in coordinating numerous donor programmes each with varied objectives not linked to the CIDP; that is where the momentum sits.
It is clear that in this second phase of devolution, that donors and development partners have to not only align their programmes with the CIDP, they must ensure that county governments are aware of their activities.
There is a sense of autonomy emerging. Donors aren’t the all-powerful entities they used to be; either they make themselves relevant or counties will eventually have no real use for them.
In terms of the private sector, what is clear is that there is a growing interest for county governments to engage with the private sector.
As counties open channels for communication with the private sector, there is impetus for the private sector to effectively organise itself at county level to fully leverage the attention of county government.
The private sector associations must now ensure they have representation in all counties so that they are prepared to present their ideas on how to work more effectively at county level.
Gone are the days where the private sector associations had main offices in Nairobi and paltry representation at county level. The Private sector must be organised and effective at both national and county levels if they are to spawn strategies, relevant to the local context.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
