NG-CDF Funding to Kitui County Has Topped KES 12.2 Billion Since Devolution

Kitui County’s eight constituencies have collectively received an estimated KES 12.2 billion in National Government Constituency Development Fund (NG-CDF) allocations since the fund was realigned with devolution in the 2013/2014 financial year, a BusinessRadar analysis found, working from NG-CDF Board disbursement data. That figure spans over a decade of annual allocations, project approvals, and – inevitably, at that scale – a mix of completed, delayed, and occasionally abandoned projects across the county’s constituencies.

NG-CDF money is approved and spent at constituency level, which is a structurally different thing from county government spending even though the two are easy to conflate. Each of Kitui’s eight constituencies – Kitui Central, Kitui East, Kitui Rural, Kitui South, Kitui West, Mwingi Central, Mwingi North, and Mwingi West – has its own annual allocation, set by a formula that factors in constituency population and a poverty index, then administered by a locally-based NG-CDF committee rather than by the Governor’s office. This is why a single county can show strong NG-CDF growth on paper while individual constituencies within it experience that growth very unevenly: the formula rewards population and poverty indicators, not need as any one resident might define it.

Individual constituency allocations have grown substantially over the past decade. According to constituency-level NG-CDF records compiled by Mzalendo, Mwingi Central’s approved allocation rose from roughly KES 152 million in the 2022/23 financial year to just over KES 202 million for 2025/26 – a jump of nearly a third in three years. Kitui Rural shows a similar trajectory, climbing from about KES 138 million to KES 183 million over the same window. Multiply increases like that across eight constituencies and the county-wide total climbs quickly, even before accounting for the base allocations that existed well before 2022.

What that money is actually spent on varies constituency by constituency, but the broad categories are consistent across Kitui: primary and secondary school infrastructure (classrooms, laboratories, dormitories), water projects (boreholes, piped supply extensions), bursary disbursements for secondary and tertiary students, and smaller allocations to security infrastructure and sports facilities. Individually, NG-CDF projects tend to be modest in scale – a single classroom block, a single borehole – which is part of why the fund’s cumulative impact is easy to underestimate from any one project alone, and only becomes visible when totalled across hundreds of small approvals over more than a decade.

Nationally, the pattern in Kitui mirrors a wider trend: NG-CDF allocations to all 290 constituencies have more than doubled since devolution began, from about KES 22 billion in FY2013/14 to KES 55.9 billion in FY2025/26, with cumulative disbursements since 2013 now estimated above KES 491 billion nationally. Kitui’s roughly KES 12.2 billion share of that is neither exceptional nor negligible – it broadly tracks the national growth curve rather than sharply outperforming or lagging it.

What a cumulative funding figure like this doesn’t tell you, on its own, is how much of that money translated into finished, functioning infrastructure versus how much sits in stalled or abandoned projects – a real and separately documented problem in Kitui, where county-level audits have flagged hundreds of millions of shillings in incomplete health and other public works. A large historical NG-CDF total is a measure of funds committed, not a scorecard of outcomes delivered; the two numbers matter for different reasons, and conflating them risks either overstating the fund’s impact or understating the genuine local projects – schools, water points, bursaries – that NG-CDF money in Kitui has actually completed over more than a decade of disbursements.

Want to read more about this? BusinessRadar's NG-CDF analysis and Mzalendo's Kitui Rural page.