Environmental sustainability is a key component of sustainable development and Kenya continues to make strides to incorporate this into governance structures.
This ensures that deliberate actions are undertaken to safeguard the environmental rights of all Kenyans as provided for in Chapter 42 of the constitution of Kenya and also to protect the interests of future generations.
Consequently, elected leaders are required to be aware of this principle since they bear the greatest responsibility in ensuring environmental sustainability is ingrained in governance.
Subsequently, this research sought a basic methodology to establish how Members of the 12th Parliament have contributed to environmental sustainability in their constituencies.
In the methodology, the study developed a simple scorecard to determine the percentage of funds each constituency used on environmental activities between 2017 to 2022 within the provisions of the National Government Constituencies Development Fund Act. Under this Act, members receive funds from the national government to conduct development projects in their constituencies.
The NG-CDF Act provides that;
“Environmental activities may be considered as development projects for purposes of this Act provided that the allocation to such activities does not exceed two per centum of the total allocation of the constituency in that financial year.”
Therefore, the scorecard evaluated that a constituency that utilized between 1.5 to 2 percent of the allocated funds on environmental activities met the highest provision under the NG-CDF Act and was awarded a score of GOOD.
Those that utilized 1 to 1.5 percent were rated as AVERAGE, 0.5 to 1 percent were graded as POOR and 0 to 0.5 were scored as VERY POOR.
While this is a narrow way of judging environmental sustainability given the wide scope of the subject, this quantitative approach remains a strong indicator of governance intention.
This is also the first report of its kind and the methodology will improve in coming years as we release more reports and our Environmental Sustainability Governance (ESG) index is refined.
We expect to release this report annually and will extend the same to other duty bearers such as governors.
For this reason, we will be seeking partnerships in this endeavor. To collaborate or provide insight on this project kindly email info@cleanupkenya.org
The double purpose of this report is to provide information to the public to enable them to make representation decisions and improve governance as well as to inspire elected and aspiring leaders to prioritize environmental development projects in their plans as provided for in the law.
The findings of the report will be released on a rolling basis covering several counties starting in June 2022 until August 2022.
ABOUT CLEAN UP KENYA
Established in 2015, Clean Up Kenya is a national advocacy organization working to hold to account government duty bodies, state officers, corporations, green-washing Non-Governmental Organizations, and domestic and commercial polluters for Kenya’s public sanitation crisis.
We primarily work with communities to advance their rights to sustainable public sanitation.
As experts in community mobilizing for cleanups, we have conducted numerous projects across the country with some being attended by over 1000 volunteers.
At the core of our work is honest and actual involvement in communities – not PR events.
We receive no funding for our work but collaborate with other like-minded organizations both nationally and internationally on projects.
Refs
First National Leadership Environmental Sustainability Scorecard to be released