Socio-Economic Status of Busia County with COVID-19

Abstract

The County’s main revenue sources comprise of the transfers from the National Government, Conditional Grants and its own source revenue (OSR). The county total revenue increased by 97 per cent from Ksh 4.06 billion in FY 2013/14 to Ksh 8.01 billion in FY 2019/20, an average annual growth rate of 16.3 per cent. In FY 2020/21 the County’s total revenue amounted to Ksh 7.19 billion, which was 69 per cent of the annual budget allocation of Ksh 10.42 billion. In FY 2020/21, the County received Ksh 256.20 million and Ksh 505.64 million from National Government and Development partners respectively. The value of conditional grants significantly increased from Ksh 266.37 million in FY 2013/14 to Ksh 761.84 million in FY 2020/21. During FY 2014/15, Busia County achieved 97 per cent of OSR target, which declined to 44.76 per cent in FY 2019/20. Development expenditure has performed weakly on average accounting for 28.8 per cent of total county expenditure during the 2013-2021 as the county wage bill has been growing tremendously at the expense of development expenditure. Pending bills plummeted during FY 2020/21 due to county efforts to release cash owed to suppliers to cushion businesses and families from the effects of the pandemic. To steer the county towards achieving its budgetary objective and development goals, the county needs to mobilize more finances from OSR to increase the available revenues for budgetary operations, seek for more funding in form of grants from development partners to cater for the critical development projects in the county, ensure that the ongoing projects are completed before launching new project and clear any pending bills and arrears owed to suppliers.