Kenya embeds disaster risk tags in budget planning

Kenya has improved its disaster financing framework by merging disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation expenses into national budgeting, providing policymakers with a clearer perspective on how public funds are utilized to enhance resilience. The National Treasury initiated a disaster and climate budget tagging and expenditure tracking system, which consolidates climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction within public financial management instead of treating them as separate spending priorities.

This initiative was requested by the Treasury and supported by the UN's Disaster Risk Reduction Office through the Intra-African, Caribbean and Pacific Disaster Risk Reduction Programme. The main objective is to enhance expenditure tracking, institutional capacity, and coordination while offering evidence for Kenya's Disaster Risk Management Strategy 2025–2030 and Disaster Risk Financing Strategy 2026–2030.

By tagging expenditures, ministries, departments, and agencies can pinpoint spending that contributes to reducing disaster and climate risks, thus identifying resource concentration, revealing financing gaps, and providing officials with a stronger basis for allocating funds in future budget cycles. The approach tackles a historical issue in public finance, where adaptation and disaster reduction programs often overlap but are planned, classified, and reported separately.

The Treasury integrated climate budget tagging guidelines into the government's budget process, with instructions included in finalizing the 2026-27 budget and medium-term spending plans. Officials across the government received training in integrated disaster reduction and climate adaptation approaches, policy coherence, and risk-informed planning.

Furthermore, an inter-agency taskforce guided the preparation of the Disaster Risk Financing Strategy 2026–2030, linking information from expenditure tracking with financial preparedness decisions. The strategy, launched by the National Treasury in June, aims to shift Kenya from a predominantly reactive, crisis-driven financing model to proactive financial preparation, covering both national and county governments.

It broadens Kenya's approach beyond merely retaining or transferring financial risk to incorporating investments that mitigate risks before disasters strike. Officials emphasized the need for stronger financial preparedness, citing the 2024 March-April-May floods, which affected around 410,000 people, resulted in 315 deaths, and caused estimated damages totaling 187 billion Kenyan shillings.

The budget-tagging system has begun to offer a more detailed picture of government resilience spending, with substantial 2023-24 allocations in various sectors, including crop development, irrigation, medical services, housing and urban development, transportation, water and sanitation, and wildlife. This system is part of a broader effort to integrate climate and disaster considerations into fiscal management.