<b>STRATEGIC POLICY PAPER: </b><b>Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks </b><b>for Climate Change Adaptation Projects </b><b>in Kenya</b>

Executive SummaryThe Core Challenge Kenya invests an estimated KES 47 billion annually in climate change adaptation across all sectors. Yet the country lacks a coherent, funded, and systematically applied M&E architecture to determine whether these investments are achieving their intended outcomes, at what cost, for whom, and with what sustainability. This policy paper addresses that gap.
Climate change adaptation — unlike mitigation — presents inherently complex monitoring and evaluation challenges. Adaptation outcomes are long-term, non-linear, and context-dependent. Attribution is difficult: how much of a farmer's improved yield results from drought-resistant seed varieties versus normal rainfall variation? How much of a community's reduced flood damage results from mangrove restoration versus luck of storm timing? These challenges are not reasons to abandon adaptation M&E; they are reasons to design it more carefully and resource it more adequately than has been done to date.
This paper presents Kenya's National Climate Change Adaptation M&E Framework (NCCAMEF) — a comprehensive, multi-level, and institutionally grounded architecture for tracking, learning from, and improving Kenya's adaptation investments. The NCCAMEF establishes:• A four-level monitoring architecture spanning project, programme, sector/county, and national levels, with clearly defined data flows, reporting obligations, and feedback mechanisms at each level;• The Kenya Adaptation Indicators System (KAIS) — 78 core and supplementary indicators aligned with international frameworks (UNFCCC, GCF, Sendai Framework, SDGs) and disaggregated by gender, geography, and livelihood type;• A governance architecture centred on the Climate M&E Directorate (CMD) within the National Climate Change Council, with defined roles for line ministries, county governments, development partners, and implementing organisations;• The Kenya Climate Adaptation Data Platform (KCADP) — a digital, interoperable data management system linking project-level M&E to national climate dashboards;• A five-year capacity development programme for national and county M&E practitioners;• A financial architecture targeting a dedicated M&E budget allocation of 5–7% of total adaptation investment across all funded programmes.
Critical Finding A diagnostic assessment of Kenya's existing adaptation M&E landscape found that: 73% of reviewed adaptation projects have M&E systems designed primarily for donor reporting rather than national learning; fewer than 30% of county climate action plans include measurable adaptation indicators; the average M&E budget allocation across assessed projects is 2.1% — less than half the international standard of 5%; and no systematic mechanism exists for aggregating project-level M&E data into a national adaptation progress picture.
The paper makes fifteen core policy recommendations, targeted at the National Climate Change Council, the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry, county governments, development partners, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. The overarching recommendation is that climate change adaptation M&E be treated not as an administrative compliance function but as a strategic learning system — one that enables Kenya to continuously improve its adaptation choices in the face of uncertain and accelerating climate change.
Implementation of the NCCAMEF is estimated to require KES 3.2 billion over the first five years (2025–2030), against projected benefits — from improved adaptation investment efficiency alone — estimated at KES 18–27 billion. This represents a cost-benefit ratio of 5.6–8.4:1 and represents one of the highest-return investments in Kenya's climate agenda.