Kenya's public finance reforms stir regional interest

Programme Coordinator Joel Bett, ICT specialist Jacob Muimi and HR specialist Judie Chache during the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative Peer Learning event in Kigali, Rwanda. [Courtesy]

For years, Kenya's public finance reforms lived in spreadsheets and email chains. When officers moved, their institutional knowledge often went with them.

That is now history. At the Digital Transformation Public Sector Forum in Mombasa this week, officials presented REFORMiS, a system designed and built within the National Treasury that brings planning, spending, reporting and institutional knowledge together in one place.

Spearheaded by the Public Financial Management Reforms (PFMR) Secretariat, the system is now in its third year and already serves more than 39 government agencies.

Programme Coordinator Joel Bett describes the platform as an answer to a long-standing gap. "REFORMiS was born precisely in that gap between ambition and reality," he told regional peers at a Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) workshop in Kigali earlier this year.

It is more than an ICT tool, he said. It is a governance reform enabler that holds the effort together across ministries, departments and agencies.

Kenya's push to fix its public finances goes back more than two decades. In 2003, the government adopted the Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation.

At the time, officials had come to see that weak financial systems were dragging down growth and service delivery.

It was then that the first formal PFM Reform Strategy was developed, running from 2006 to 2011. Its focus was threefold: budget credibility, early rollout of the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS), an automated electronic system used by national and county governments to manage public finances, budgeting and procurement, and finally better financial reporting.

The 2010 Constitution and the Public Finance Management Act of 2012 raised the stakes.

New bodies were created, among them the Controller of Budget and the Commission on Revenue Allocation.

Counties gained real fiscal power. A second strategy, covering 2013 to 2018, absorbed those changes. A third, from 2018 to 2023, turned the focus to results.

The current strategy, the fourth cycle, runs from 2023 to 2028 and aims to bring to the fore transparency, fiscal discipline and better services.

Through all four, the Secretariat - which sits inside the National Treasury - has been the coordinating hub, setting priorities, tracking progress, raising resources and keeping development partners aligned. Bett has long argued that its job is institutional, not technical. Strong systems, he says, count for more than isolated projects.

Before REFORMiS, reform data sat in silos, progress reports lagged, and managers often could not say with confidence what was happening on the ground.

Before building the system, the team mapped out how work was done: the people, the processes, and the policy. Then they embarked on building it.

The result was an enterprise system with modules for monitoring and evaluation, finance and accounts, procurement and assets, human resources, administration and knowledge management.

A collaboration layer called PFM Connect lets agencies and partners share updates. Role-based access, audit trails and data protection run underneath, with live dashboards giving senior leaders a single view of operations. So far, the system has handled more than 150 work plans and processed over 2,000 activity requests.

Jacob Muimi, the secretariat's head of ICT and the project's solution lead, took the Mombasa forum through the journey during the Intelligent Government track. He explained the three-step sequence of work thus: "Fix the processes first. Build the technology second. Add analytics and AI support last".

He made it clear that AI is there to assist, not make decisions, because that responsibility rests with the people.

And the REFORMiS system has gained recognition for its transformative nature.

In 2025, for instance, it won a CIO 100 Silver Mark of Excellence. Teams from Gambia, Zambia and other African countries have visited or studied it, and Bett has hosted several of those exchanges.

At the Kigali workshop, the PFMR Secretariat boss pointed out that the next phase - REFORMiS 4.0 - will add predictive analytics and early-warning tools, and that pilot testing was already underway.

Public financial management is important because it determines how tax revenue is turned into clinics, roads and schools. And according to officials, REFORMiS gives those who manage the reforms a clearer, shared view of progress across government.

The system was designed and is owned by the National Treasury, and the Secretariat says this has allowed it to be shaped around how the public service works day to day.

As the techies continue to develop and improve the system, it is very encouraging that the reform work that was once spread across files and email chains is now kept in a single record, available to the agencies taking part.