Capacity Building on Public-Private Partnerships, Kenya

Year: 2024–2025  |  Client: Government of Kenya (GoK)  |  Country: Kenya

Cities Forum delivers capacity-building programmes on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) for the Government of Kenya, working with the Ministry responsible for regional development and the national PPP Directorate to strengthen the country's ability to develop and deliver PPP projects. Public-private partnerships can unlock private investment and expertise for critical infrastructure, but only where the public sector has the capacity to structure, procure and manage them well; building that capacity is precisely the aim of this engagement.

Our approach

The programmes are practical and comprehensive, combining hands-on training, case-study-based learning and continued support for real regional project development. Rather than treating PPPs as an abstract concept, Cities Forum grounds the learning in the concrete tasks that determine whether partnerships succeed, and accompanies officials as they apply what they learn to actual projects. The curriculum spans the full lifecycle of PPP project development, structuring, finance, audit, project management, and operations and management, through to handover, so that participants gain a coherent understanding of how a partnership is conceived, financed, delivered and ultimately transferred.

What we delivered

This breadth matters because PPPs fail most often not at the headline stage but in the details: a poorly structured risk allocation, weak financial analysis, inadequate management during construction and operation, or a badly handled handover. By covering structuring, finance, audit, management and operations together, and by reinforcing the learning with case studies and continued support for live projects, Cities Forum helps Kenyan institutions build the practical, end-to-end competence that robust PPP delivery requires. The focus on continued support for regional project development ensures that capability is embedded in practice, not left as classroom theory.

Impact

The engagement strengthens Kenya's institutional capacity to use public-private partnerships effectively to develop and finance infrastructure, including in regional development and sustainable sectors. For Cities Forum, it showcases a capability that complements its policy and mobility work, building the skills and systems that governments need to mobilise private investment responsibly, and deepens the firm's partnership with the Government of Kenya across the broader agenda of sustainable, well-financed development.