UDA Sh550m, ODM Sh294m, DCP Nothing

Updated 2 October 2026.

The Registrar of Political Parties has gazetted the Political Parties Fund allocations for 2026/27.

UDA: Sh549.97 million. ODM: Sh293.78 million. Jubilee: about Sh128.9 million. Total fund: about Sh1.4 billion, across 48 parties.

UDA and ODM between them take roughly Sh843.75 million — more than half of the entire fund. The other 46 parties share what is left.

DCP, which won a parliamentary by-election a month ago and intends to contest every ward in the country, received nothing.

Why the shape is the story

The fund is financed at an amount equivalent to 0.3 per cent of national revenue and disbursed quarterly as the Treasury releases it. Seventy per cent is distributed on the total votes each party secured at the previous general election, with the remainder based on representation of special interest groups and total elected members.

That formula does exactly what it is designed to do, and its design has consequences.

It entrenches. The parties that did well last time are funded to do well next time.

It starves losers. A party that loses badly loses the income it would need to maintain branches, staff and a membership register between elections — which is why defeated Kenyan parties do not slowly rebuild, they fade.

It gives new parties nothing. A party formed after 2022 has no qualifying vote share. Every new Kenyan party contests its first election on donations and its principals' resources.

Why that matters beyond fairness

Because it explains the structure of Kenyan politics.

If building a new party is unfunded and acquiring an old one is cheap, the rational move is acquisition. Which is why the registry is full of dormant parties with symbols, why movements adopt existing vehicles rather than registering, and why the same names recirculate through different labels every cycle.

The funding formula is a large part of why Kenyan parties are vehicles rather than institutions.

What a candidate should conclude

Do not plan around party money.

Whatever your party's headline allocation, the fund pays for national operations, secretariats and central campaigns. It does not typically pay for your polling agents, your fuel or your ward coordinators.

Those are yours to fund and yours to organise, and both are far more manageable across twelve months than compressed into six weeks. A campaign that starts recruiting agents against an enumerated list of polling streams now is doing the one thing the fund would never have paid for anyway.

Related: the fund formula explained.

What the fund is supposed to be for

Worth remembering, since the allocations are usually reported as a scoreboard.

The Political Parties Fund exists to reduce parties' dependence on private money, and therefore to reduce the influence of whoever provides it. A state-funded party is, in theory, less obligated to financiers.

Judged against that purpose the Kenyan fund half works. It provides real money to established parties, and it provides nothing to new ones — which means every new party is funded exactly the way the fund exists to prevent.

A formula weighted partly on verified member subscriptions rather than entirely on past votes would address that, by rewarding parties that raise from members rather than parties that won four years ago.

It is not on anybody's agenda, for the same reason nothing that redistributes advantage ever is.

What parties must do to keep it

Funding is conditional on compliance with the Political Parties Act — audited accounts, proper records and filings made on time. The Registrar has warned that non-compliant parties face loss of funding and possible deregistration.

For an aspirant considering a smaller party as a route to the ballot, that is a question worth asking directly: is the party compliant, and is its funding at risk? A party in difficulty with the Registrar is a party whose nomination rules and membership list may not be certified on time — and those two certifications are what put your name on a ballot paper.