Where the money slows down — the journey from budget line to finished project.
The cascade
Allocation is automatic — every constituency gets the same. Using the money is the hard part: Treasury has to release it, councils have to spend it, and projects have to finish. Each step leaks.
Allocated by the budget, released by the Treasury, utilised as reported by MLGRD — a national utilisation rate has been published for 2025 only, and where a stage is unpublished the bar says so rather than guessing.
The audit
The Auditor-General's 2024 CDF report examined 4,879 projects across all 156 constituencies. This is how they stood. The figures below are the audit's own counted totals, counted constituency by constituency — the audit does not publish the projects name by name.
The split above is the Auditor-General's printed totals (Appendix 3 of the FY2024 report), not a subtraction. One wrinkle in the report itself: its Mwansabombwe row accounts for 11 of its 12 brought-forward projects, so the printed split — 3,060 completed, 1,293 in progress, 525 not started — sums to 4,878 of the 4,879 projects examined.
Rural share versus completion for all ten provinces — and what gets built where. The same money, very different terrain.