The week before last, my organisation hosted a week of events designed to discuss equity and how Kenya could more fairly distribute resources across and within counties. We had a packed agenda and good participation in a number of events. Here is what stood out for me from the week.

1. As Professor Yash Pal Ghai noted in his keynote address, equity infuses the 2010 Constitution. It was understood by the drafters as a principal contributor to national unity and nation-building. With elections looming in 2017, the usual questions about whether Kenya is in fact one nation will be raised; in answering these questions, we must look at what we have done to enhance equity since 2010, which itself demands more robust debate about the meaning of the term.

2. There is an appetite for discussions about equity and fairness, and ordinary people are capable of discussing these issues. We saw slum dwellers in Korogocho, middle-class citizens, civil society representatives, county assembly members, Senators and others debate fairness, and there were solid insights at all levels. The key is to engage people at the level of principles they can understand readily and then move them gradually toward policy decisions.

3. Academic work in this area is weak and hard to find. Though we reached out to University of Nairobi and the Strathmore Business School, and though we hosted events at both places, the number of professors, lecturers and students who got involved in the week was minimal, and many were only working peripherally on areas related to equity. Given that improving equity is a constitutional imperative that requires data, as well as thoughtful descriptive analysis and theoretical argument, this is a major gap in Kenya right now.

4. In events like the public forums we hosted last week, there is an incredible amount of ignorance among those people who should be best informed about these issues, such as Senators, academics and civil society advocates. I lost track of the many misstatements, misrepresentations and outright lies uttered by some of our presenters, but I will cite just a few things people said that are categorically false. One is that counties are not doing anything to think about equity at the ward level (we published a paper during the week showing that this was not true, and we had representatives from Elgeyo Marakwet County that have thought deeply about the issue with us).

Another is that counties are distributing less than 4 per cent of their budgets to health services (this is not even close to accurate) or that they are collecting 30 per cent less than local authorities used to collect (not so; on average, they are collecting more). We had academic researchers who did not appear to know what a quintile was or that the Senate had recently passed a new revenue sharing formula. As a colleague from the counties said, it appears that many of the “big people” in Nairobi do not really know what is going on around the country. Sadly, I had to agree.

5. Interest from government in equity is low and participation was weak. The Council of Governors did not show up for our main event, and few government participants came to any of the events. We had participation from Nairobi County and from Elgeyo Marakwet County, and the MCAs present actually appeared to be more alive to the discussion we were having than some of the Senators. This could suggest that the national discussion about equity will emerge more from the counties than from national actors.

6. People generally understand that equality is not the same as equity, and generally agree we should not treat everyone the same even if they are different. This raises the question as to why so much of Kenyan public policy overemphasises equality, as we showed during the week, or uses skewed measures of need. The main reason emerging from the discussions was the wide gap between the interests and preferences of citizens and the interests and preferences of their leaders.

7. If we are going to have a serious debate about equity in Kenya, our journalists need to up their game. We had respectable coverage of some of our events (though certainly not all), but on balance, most journalists seemed not to really understand what we were discussing. There was a tendency to confuse basic issues, such as the difference between the CDF and the CRA formula, or between the principle of need and measuring access to services. We are not served well as a country by this confusion among journalists who by now should have a much better understanding of these issues. Journalists also missed major issues we raised, such as the distorted formula for sharing resources among Level 5 hospitals, which punishes larger hospitals and is a major news story.

Jason Lakin is Kenya country director for the International Budget Partnership. E-mail: [email protected]