Kenya to host Africa’s delivery units’ 2020 virtual conference

Kenya will host the virtual African Delivery Exchange (ADX) summit 2020 to deliberate on service delivery in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event is organized by the President’s Delivery Unit in partnership with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) as well as the Africa Development Bank.

It will bring together senior government officials, delivery experts and development partners to exchange experiences and learn from each other about ensuring effective delivery in governments.

Participants will discuss the importance of delivery, the problems they face and the solutions they have found including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which, among other things, has provided a real-time lesson in the importance of delivery by governments for their citizens.

According to TBI Centre of Government and Delivery Lead Eden Getachew, TBI supports 15 governments across Africa directly in achieving their development goals, has had an in-country presence in Kenya since 2015.

Getachew says TBI helped to establish the President’s Delivery Unit, drawing on its experience of working with governments across the world in coordinating and supporting delivery efforts, and continues to support its work today.

She said Kenya has really benefited from the unit saying, “The President’s Delivery Unit (PDU) has grown to become an important cog in the engine of development. Since its creation in 2015, the PDU has been instrumental in tracking over 2,000 projects and ensuring they are either completed on time or remain on course. This is achieved by tracking the progress, identifying ‘sticky’ issues which pose problems and, where necessary, bringing those issues to the attention of decision makers.”

Getachew said the committees formed under the Executive Order No. 1 of 2019 to coordinate development at various levels of government have also found PDU useful.

“It has a presence at the grassroots, as its officers are secretaries to regional and county development implementation and coordination committees (RDICCs and CDICCs). PDU uses its capacity to escalate issues upwards, and ensure that bottlenecks in projects are addressed as soon as possible.” She said.

She said that to a large extent, Governments and other elected authorities across Africa all face similar challenges in implementing their policies and delivering their projects, and several countries have established their own delivery units in the mould of Kenya’s PDU.