Kirinyaga has been highlighted among the counties with the lowest transparency when it comes to making their budgets public, in a recent report.
The survey titled the County Budget Transparency Survey 2020, stated that the county had an index of zero as it did not publish any budget document.
Also ranking low were the counties of Narok, Taita Taveta, and Wajir in the report by the International Budget Partnership Kenya (IBP Kenya).
On the other hand, West Pokot County was ranked the best with an index of 73 out of 100 points, having published all the assessed budget documents. Laikipia county was second with 71 points.
Nyeri, Makueni and Samburu locked up the remaining three slots in the top five counties with the most open budgets with 71,70 and 64 points respectively.
The Lead Researcher at IBP Kipkorir Biegon noted that the average transparency score across the 47 counties was 33 out of 100 points.
"This score was based on whether a county had its budget documents publicly available and on the level of information that was provided in those publicly available budget documents," he explained.
Biegon further noted that only 40% of budget documents that should be public by law were published by the counties.
The survey noted that out of the budget documents assessed, the County Quarterly Budget Implementation Reports remains the least published documents while the County Integrated Development Plan was the most published document.
The Annual Development Plan (ADP) had been progressively published over the years with the number of counties publishing the document growing from 4 in 2015, to 25 in 2018, and 33 in 2020.
Country Manager at IBP Kenya Dr. Abraham Rugo noted with concern that some counties produced these budget documents but failed to publish and publicize them.
"When we completed the availability survey and shared the results with counties, an additional 69 budget documents were made public by the counties which showed an increase of 33.5% of publicly available documents," he stated.
