Treasury forecasts counties annual expenditure to hit Sh483 billion
Hillary Mageka @hillarymageka
County governments’ annual expenditure is expected to increase from Sh405.5 billion allocated in the 2018/19 financial year to Sh483.4 billion in the current financial year.
That revelation is contained in the National Economic Outlook 2020 released yesterday by the National Treasury.
The Sh77.9 billion increment represents a growth of 19.2 per cent and will include additional conditional allocations to county governments from national government revenue in form of loans and grants.
Compensation of employees is also expected to increase by 9.1 per cent to Sh170.1 billion, accounting for 35.2 per cent of the total expenditure.
Over the same period, spending on goods and services in devolved units is expected to grow by 7.8 per cent to Sh95.9 billion.
“Expenditure on acquisition of non-financial assets, is estimated at Sh131.4 billion with the category of building and structures expected to increase by 36.3 per cent to Sh105.7 billion in 2019/20, to support the agenda of providing affordable housing,” the report says.
Expenditure on general public services in the counties is estimated to increase by 9.2 per cent to Sh146 billion in 2019/20, accounting for 30.2 per cent of the total expenditure.
According to the report, the expenditure on health, which accounts for 23.7 per cent of the total budget, is projected to grow by 24.6 per cent to Sh114.7 billion in 2019/20, of which 78.5 per cent will go to recurrent expenditure.
“Expenditure on education is estimated to grow by 19.6 per cent to Sh37.1 billion,” the report indicates.
Development expenditure is expected to grow by 53.5 per cent to 24.7 billion in 2019/20.
