- The summit shall have an open session, where all categories of invited stakeholders including the media, will be allowed to attend.
- This will be followed by a closed session where only the governors and their technical personnel will be allowed to participate.
Image: LEAH MUKANGAI
Some 24 governors are set to peer-review each other’s performance in steering their units towards achieving Vision 2030, county development plans, public finance principles among other milestones.
The meet up known as the County Peer Review Mechanism summit, will be at KICC on June 26, and has been put together by the AU’s Africa Peer Review Mechanism. It will the first subnational peer review initiative in the continent.
The APRM was established in 2003 as an instrument to monitor the adoption and implementation of policies and practices that would lead to political stability, high economic growth and accelerated regional cooperation and integration.
The mechanism ensures that heads of state and governments, and now heads of sub-national administrative unit, share experience and review each other’s performance with a view to uphold good governance practices and to pave the way for poverty alleviation and sustainable development.
It offers a forum for democratic dialogue between citizens and leaders, peer learning and regional as well as continental cooperation in which the challenges facing African countries, both individually and collectively, can be tackled.
The AU organ lobbied the 47 counties to adopt the mechanism. During the 2017 devolution conference, the devolved units agreed to have the governors submit to review by their peers as a way of holding each other accountable.
The APRM says it did a survey on citizen’s perception of performance by their county administrations in 400 wards across 12 counties and the results will be launched and discussed during the summit.
“Data on citizens’ perceptions was collected from 400 electoral wards in 12 counties of Bungoma, Trans Nzoia, Nandi, Elgeyo Marakwet, Nyeri, Machakos, Makueni, Mombasa, Siaya, Busia, Vihiga and Kakamega. The data was incorporated into the respective counties Self-Assessment Reports,” a media digest shared with the Star reads.
The County Self-Assessment Reports were validated at the subcounty level across the 12 counties in a process spear-headed by the CPRM Panel of Eminent Persons, led by former ACK Arch-bishop Eliud Wabukhala.
Further, it says, the 12 governors whose County Review Reports have been finalised, are now ready for peer reviewing at the inaugural National Summit on sub-national level peer reviews.
The entity says the aim of launching the county peer review mechanism is to promote the counties compliance with democratic governance and the separation of powers.
It also aims to promote reliability of sources of revenue to facilitate effective governance and service delivery.
Other objectives of the summit include to promote linkage between Vision 2030 and county governments’ development agenda; county governments’ compliance with legal provisions on public finance management and governance in general.
Others are public participation in governance, to provide a tool for tracking implementation of SDGs and Vision 2030, AU Agenda 2063 and CIDPs at the county level.
APRM says the agenda for the June 26 meet is deliberately drafted to support an inclusive format of discussions where at least 24 governors are primed to make interventions to ensure fruitful deliberations.
The summit shall have an open session, where all categories of invited stakeholders including the media, will be allowed to attend.
This will be followed by a closed session where only the governors and their technical personnel will be allowed to participate.
The key output of the summit will be the commitments that the governors will make regarding implementation of their County Programmes of Action.
Their peers and the citizens will apply pressure to ensure improved service delivery performance in line with the said commitments.
This has necessitated the establishment of a county peer review mechanism as a multi-agency tool to be used in the promotion and entrenchment of good governance across the counties.
It will also be used as a credible monitoring tool for the implementation of the Bottom-up Economic Transformation Agenda, County Integrated Development Plans, Vision 2030, SDGs as well as Africa Union Agenda 2063, the entity says.