The Nairobi County Government is nearing the completion of a significant initiative aimed at enhancing service delivery by establishing six new administrative units, known as boroughs.
Lydia Mathia, the Nairobi City County Chief Officer overseeing boroughs and Sub County Administration, emphasized in an interview with a local media station that this new model aims to empower Nairobi residents by decentralizing critical functions from City Hall to the grassroots level.
“We are devolving to actualize devolution. The core idea behind devolution was to provide services to Kenyans as close to home as possible. However, due to logistical challenges such as limited officers and workspace, it often feels like devolution never fully materialized,” she explained.
Mathia highlighted that while devolution extended to the county level, there remained a crucial aspect of decentralizing services further down to the village level to ensure accessibility for all.
“The national government devolved to the 47 counties, but the counties did not devolve down to the wards. That’s what we aim to address with the boroughs. It’s essentially City Hall extending its reach downward,” she elaborated.
The boroughs, resembling fragmented district administrative units, will reorganize Nairobi’s 17 sub-counties based on population size, each led by a representative from City Hall.
With each borough encompassing three to four sub-counties, the City is reassessing the services to be integrated into the borough system, transforming City Hall into a central command center rather than a service provider—a significant departure from the current system.
Last May, Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja disclosed plans to establish the boroughs as part of a broader strategy to decentralize services while addressing the Senate Devolution Committee.
