Kenya's devolved Ward Development Fund allocates resources through population-based quota formulas that create sharp thresholds in per-capita funding across county assembly wards. The analysis draws on administrative records of 412 funded projects implemented between 2014 and 2022, combined with ward-level population data from the 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census. The running variable is the ward population relative to the quota threshold that determines funding tier. The results indicate a statistically significant discontinuity in abandonment rates at the threshold, with wards just above the threshold experiencing abandonment rates 14.3 percentage points higher than those just below (p = 0.008, 95% CI [3.8, 24.8]). This discontinuity is concentrated among capital-intensive infrastructure projects and is absent for smaller community-level projects. The findings suggest that quota-induced funding compression creates implementation capacity constraints that manifest as project abandonment.
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Nyakach et al. (2026) studied this question.
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