Kenya

Kenya’s assessment in 2000—part of a series of pilot studies—was carried out in collaboration with Series for Alternative Research in East Africa by professors Njuguna Ng’ethe, Jeremiah Owiti and Shadrack Nasongo of Nairobi University. It identified social injustice, corruption and impunity as some of the most worrying problems in Kenya’s political system. While these findings helped initiate a general discussion of these issues, some challenges identified in the 2000 report (such as the degree of impunity and the scale of gender inequality) remain unresolved, and threaten the country’s peaceful democratic development.

Between 2002 and 2003, International IDEA—in collaboration with the AULA—conducted comprehensive evaluations of democracy at the local level in four cities in East and Southern Africa. The aim was to identify cities in this area that best represented some of the major local-level governance challenges in the region. For various reasons, four cities emerged as the most suitable locations to pilot the local democracy assessment instrument: Gaborone City,Botswana, Lusaka,Zambia, Mwanza, and Nairobi,Kenya.

International IDEA, in collaboration with a Kenyan multi-stakeholder team, developed a pilot State of Local Democracy assessment in Nairobi in 2004. Combining desk studies with research on the ground, the report was developed in the first phase of the AULA and International IDEA’s joint capacity-building project on how to strengthen governance in the region.

ASSESSMENT REPORTS