Creating a County Development Index to Identify Marginalized Counties

Creating A County Development Index To Identify Marginalized Counties

Publisher	Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA)
Year of Publication
Category	Policies and Guidelines
County	All/General
Description	Marginalisation has persisted in some regions of Kenya thanks to aspects of colonial legacy, historical injustices and the uneven allocation of resources since independence. Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 was anchored on a strategy of investing resources in high potential areas with high economic returns to attain rapid economic growth. Though the sessional paper also called for people-centred expenditure regimes that would uplift the provision of health care and education in marginalised areas of Kenya, marginalisation has remained malignant in some regions of the country, in spite of the 1965 policy declarations of intent. In addition, marginalisation in Kenya has been caused by poor governance, limited employment opportunities and general economic underdevelopment. The nature, causes, constitutional references and impacts of marginalisation in Kenya are used as background to generate policy options on the prevention and alleviation of marginalisation in Kenya. County ranking is adopted as the most objective tool to identify counties that are relatively marginalised. The CRA is required, under Article 216(4) of the Constitution of Kenya 2010, to determine, publish and regularly review a policy setting out the criteria by which to identify the marginalised areas in Kenya. The policy proposed herein outlines actions to be undertaken and structures to be put in place to ensure that the quality of life for people who are marginalised, or who live in marginalised areas, is improved. The policy specifies areas that the government should target to bring about sustainable and equitable growth in marginalised areas, without compromising the level of services in the rest of the country. In this paper, the county was used as the basic unit to assess marginalisation. County Development Indices (CDIs) were determined for all the counties, and the counties were ranked on the basis of their CDI. Counties with low CDI were categorised as marginalised, relative to those counties with a higher CDI. The CDI is a reliable measure of marginalisation since it exposes the relative ease of accessing basic goods and services that are normally used in measuring the quality of life. The principal socio-economic factors, variables and indices (such as indices on poverty, access to water, education, energy and sanitation, life expectancy, maternal health, disease burden, population demographics, etc.), used in other jurisdictions to characterise marginalised areas and groups, have been identified. A process of computing the CDI was developed. Values of the various indicators are first converted into the respective indices and percentage weight values are allocated to each indicator and summed up to give CDI. The CDI was used to rank the counties in three categories: most marginalised, moderately marginalised and well off. The data used in determining the CDIs were sourced from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). Source: Commission on Revenue Allocation, www.crakenya.org
Tags	Public Finance
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