Decentralization in Africa: Time for a Strategic Reset

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(TL;DR) Germany has invested heavily in decentralization in Africa and achieved real improvements at the local level, but national power structures remain largely centralized, so a strategic reset is needed to align future support with political realities, focus on fewer but stronger programs, and embed decentralization more smartly in democracy, service delivery, and sector reforms. My review of a recent DEval-Study.

What the DEval Study Actually Says

Between 2000 and 2022, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) financed approximately 300 decentralization projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, committing around 2.5 billion Euros in total. The resulting evaluation by the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) is one of the most comprehensive reviews of this portfolio to date, and it closes a significant knowledge gap: no systematic overall assessment of this scale had previously been conducted.

The core findings are clear-eyed. Demonstrable results exist primarily at the local level: stronger administrative capacities in municipal governments, improved fiscal endowment for subnational authorities, and broader political participation on the ground. But the bigger ambitions of decentralization reform have rarely materialized. There are few measurable contributions to structural conflict reduction, limited influence on decentralization-friendly legal frameworks, and scant verifiable impact on macroeconomic development, social progress, or democratization at scale.

The Underlying Tension

DEval points to a persistent conceptual divergence as a key explanatory factor. While German development actors aim for substantive transfers of power and resources, many central governments in Sub-Saharan Africa support decentralization only in formal terms, while actively safeguarding central power structures in practice. Technical assistance, however well designed, cannot easily overcome political incentives that run in the opposite direction.

The external environment has also worsened. Other donors have withdrawn from decentralization support, eroding multilateral reform dialogues that once provided a platform for coordinated engagement. The late 1990s model of embedded governance reform supported by broad donor coalitions has largely disappeared. Germany now remains one of the last major donors engaged in decentralization support at scale, but does so in a shrinking and increasingly contested development landscape.

The BMZ’s Response and Its Contradictions

The BMZ welcomed the evaluation and confirmed that the portfolio was broadly relevant, internally and externally coherent, and effective at the local level. It announced its intention to feed DEval’s recommendations into future portfolio development and to use the findings in sector dialogue with partner governments. Yet the Ministry explicitly ruled out developing a separate decentralization strategy, arguing that decentralization should be pursued as a cross-cutting element within other sectors.

This is where a tension emerges. DEval is explicit that strategic adjustments to date have been largely incremental and operational, and that a genuine strategic realignment is still outstanding. If decentralization is absorbed as a secondary thread into climate, urban development, or conflict prevention programming, without its own strategic logic, the risk is marginalization rather than integration.

Three Levels of Consequence

For German development cooperation, the implications from the DEval study cluster around three levels: strategic positioning, portfolio architecture, and working methods.

  1. On strategic positioning, Germany faces a genuine choice. It can continue to treat decentralization as a lever for democracy and the rule of law, with explicit risk analysis about operating in difficult environments. Alternatively, it can reframe decentralization functionally as a means to improve local service delivery, resilience, and crisis response, without requiring comprehensive power transfers. A third path integrates decentralization components into sectoral programs where partner governments already have concrete incentives, such as climate adaptation, urban development, or social protection.
  2. On portfolio architecture, the evaluation suggests that the existing portfolio was characterized by wide diversity in instruments, objectives, and results chains. Fewer but strategically placed anchor programs connecting administrative capacity, municipal finance, local participation, and sectoral services would help reduce dispersal effects. Country selection should favor settings where minimum political reform willingness exists and where local actors retain some operational space.
  3. On working methods, the evaluation calls for more systematic use of political economy analysis before and during implementation, adaptive programming with genuine learning loops, and better integration of technical cooperation, financial instruments, and political dialogue. Decentralization should be treated increasingly as a governance innovation challenge, not a capacity-building exercise.

Implications for Consultants and Evaluators

For advisors and evaluators working in development cooperation, the study shifts the reference frame in important ways. Output-level successes at the municipal level do not automatically translate into structural transformation. Theory-based results frameworks need to be explicit about power distribution, veto players, and incentive systems. The gap between formal reform rhetoric and informal power consolidation must be made visible, not assumed away.

Local successes documented by DEval, such as improved administrative performance, participatory planning processes, and better municipal budgets, should be understood and communicated as politically relevant achievements in their own right. They can open spaces for democratic practice even when the national level remains blocked. This argues for supporting local agency without automatically coupling it to ambitious national reform targets.

Consultants are likewise bound by a duty of candor. Decentralization is no universal remedy for peace, democracy, or economic development. Rather, it is a politically contested and frequently contradictory process. In this context, pragmatic results frameworks grounded in political realities offer greater value than expansive theories of change that fail under real-world scrutiny.

Looking Ahead

DEval frames its core recommendation deliberately broadly: Germany should develop a strategic response to the tension between its own conception of decentralization and the interests of centralizing regimes in partner countries. Combined with BMZ’s current reform process, this creates a double challenge: to re-ground the rationale for decentralization as a development priority, and to restructure portfolios so that governance and decentralization elements genuinely strengthen, rather than disappear into, Germany’s core priorities in climate, peace, and just transition.

This debate offers consultants a concrete opportunity to build practical bridges between evaluation evidence, policy steering, and program design. The DEval study is an invitation to treat decentralization once again as a political project rather than a technical reform agenda.

Further Reading

This article is an English-language adaptation and expansion of the original German analysis published on Weitzenegger.de, drawing on the DEval evaluation of Germany’s decentralisation portfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa and commentary from Decentralization.net. Text and image were supported by AI.