The CIDP Is the County's Plan. Read It Before You Write a Manifesto.

Every county has a five-year plan and it is a public document. Most candidates campaigning against a county government have never opened the one they are campaigning against.

The County Integrated Development Plan, universally called the CIDP, is required by the County Governments Act 2012. The Act is blunt about its weight: no public funds may be appropriated outside a planning framework developed by the county executive committee and approved by the county assembly. If a project is not in the plan, it has no legitimate route into a budget.

What is actually inside a CIDP

Considerably more than a wish list, when it is done properly.

A CIDP sets out the county's situation analysis, its development priorities by sector, the programmes and projects it intends to deliver, the resources it expects to need, and an implementation matrix naming the responsible department and the timeframe for each item. It also carries monitoring indicators, which is the part that makes the whole thing checkable.

Many plans also carry a spatial breakdown, showing what is intended for each sub-county or ward. Where that exists, it is the section a ward candidate should read first, because it is the only place a county commits itself to a place rather than to a sector.

The annual development plan is the yearly slice of the CIDP, and the budget funds that slice. The chain runs plan, annual plan, estimates, appropriation. The budget piece follows the same chain from the money end.

Why a candidate should read it before writing a manifesto

Three reasons, all practical.

It tells you what is already promised. A candidate who campaigns to build a market that is already in the implementation matrix, funded and half built, will be corrected in public by somebody holding the document.

It tells you what the county said it would do and did not do. The implementation matrix names a timeframe. Compare that to what stands in the ward. This is the most credible material a challenger can have, because it is the county's own words set against the county's own record, with nothing invented in between.

It tells you what is realistic. A plan carries resource requirements. A promise that ignores them is a promise a Governor cannot keep, and voters who have sat through several cycles of undeliverable promises notice.

How to read one without reading all of it

CIDPs are long. You do not need the whole thing.

Go to the sector you care about and read three columns: the project list, the responsible department and the timeframe. Then find your ward or sub-county in the spatial breakdown if the plan has one. Then read the monitoring indicators for that sector, because those are what the county has agreed to be measured on.

Write down every project listed for your ward whose timeframe has already passed. That list is a document nobody has to argue with, and it takes an afternoon to build.

Where to get it, and what to do if you cannot

The plan should be on the county website. If it is not, the county director of planning holds it, and the county assembly holds the version it approved. Ask the clerk of the assembly in writing for the approved CIDP and the current annual development plan. Both are public documents.

A county that will not release its own approved plan has a problem separate from anything written in the plan. That refusal is worth raising in its own right, through a petition to the assembly or through a member who sits on the relevant committee.

Using the plan in a 2027 campaign

Specificity beats volume.

A ward candidate who can name the stalled project, the department responsible for it and the timeframe the plan itself set is speaking with more authority than any rally speech can produce. It also survives being fact-checked, which invented figures never do.

The same document works in the other direction for an incumbent. Where projects were delivered on the stated timeframe, the plan is the evidence, and the implementation matrix makes a better leaflet than a photograph does.

Public participation is required in the making of a CIDP. The next planning cycle is the moment to get a ward priority written into the document rather than argued about afterwards, and the participation rules set out how to make a submission that has to be recorded.

Start this week. Get the CIDP and the current annual development plan, find every entry that names your ward, and check each one on the ground before 10 August 2027. That walk is worth more than a month of rallies.