How to share county money based on poverty
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
11 March 2012
After much though and reflection, I have come to the conclusion that, in practical terms, poverty is meaningless. It is a negative concept and therefore impossible to measure. Asking how poor Nairobians are, for example, is like asking how quiet the streets of their city are!
A few decades ago, industrialist and radio DJ Chris Kirubi put it this way: “We shouldn’t waste time talking about poverty eradication. We should be discussing wealth creation. If we create wealth, poverty will take care of itself!”
Nonetheless; government the attempts to measure poverty levels based upon the percentage of people classified as poor. Never mind that it is not clear how dividing line between rich and poor was arrived at.
According to latest figures from the Ministry of Planning, the poorest
county in
These are the sort of figures that the Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) hopes to use in arriving at the distribution of the county monies under the Poverty Level quota.
As explained last week, the money available in the coming financial year will be about Sh106.5 billion. 12 per cent of (Sh12.8b) this will be share according to the level of poverty in a county.
The best method to use is to follow similar steps as those used in sharing out the population and land quotas. That is, to start by assigning poverty points and then work out how many shillings should be allocated per point.
The quickest way to do this is to treat the percentages as poverty points (PP). Thus Kajiado has 12PP while Turkana has 94PP. In the same way, the national average is 46PP.
The next step is to find out the total number of PPs in the whole country, that is the sum of the PPs of the all counties. The CRA County Fact Sheet indicates that the county average poverty rate is 47.2PP. With that figure, it is easy to determine the nationwide PPs: we simply multiply 47.2 by the number of counties. That is 47.2 x 47 = 2,218.4.
Dividing the Sh12.8b Poverty Quota by 2,218.4 fields Sh5.77 million per Poverty Point (PP). This is the figure to multiply by each county’s PP to get the poverty allocation.
Thus
All that remains now is the Fiscal Discipline Quota. Unfortunately, however, no data exists for this because the counties are yet to take full effect. For that reason, I suggest that this money also be shared equally for now.
The money available under Fiscal Discipline is 2 percent of the total;
that is Sh2.13b. Thus each county gets Sh45m. This brings
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