By Peter Ochieng
The government and development partners have reached an agreement to form a taskforce that will be charged with looking into hastening absorption of donor funds allocated to various programs across the country.
Upon its formation, the taskforce will work on enhancing the country’s resilience against negative effects of climate change and other challenges, hampering national social-economic growth.
The taskforce, comprising government and development partner representatives, will be mandated to work on and address challenges such as absorption funds and grants.
Speaking on Tuesday when he hosted the second development partnership forum at his official residence in Karen, Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua said the formation of the taskforce is part of steps being taken by the Kenya Kwanza administration, to enhance government’s collaboration with development partners.
“We encourage continuous engagement with our development partners. President Ruto administration modus operandi is continuous engagement with our partners and so far it has worked very well for us. We have removed the bottlenecks that frustrated our engagement. The President has spelt out the need to lessen bureaucracy and red tapes so that we can make progress in our partnership,” he said.
“We recognise that improving absorption rates of funds require addressing challenges on both sides in project implementation, and ensuring timely disbursement and utilisation of funds,” he added.
The meeting was attended by among others, the co-chairs of Development Partnership Forum Sebastian Groth (German Ambassador to Kenya) and Dr Stephen Jackson (UN Resident Coordinator).
After the meeting, a statement read by the Principal Secretary (PS) State Department for National Treasury, Dr Chris Kiptoo indicated that both government and the development partners agreed that absorption of committed funds and loans has not been at its optimal level.
He said both parties have common desire to address the challenges and obstacles, hindering the absorption of funds.
Both parties also agreed to give more visibility and importance to development partners’ support, including support that does not flow in the form of direct budget, and strive to align projects with the government’s Bottom-Up economic Transformation Agenda (BETA).