Kenya (view map)

Kenya has seen positive economic growth and a fall in absolute poverty levels in recent years.

The country’s beauty, distinctive tribes including the Masi Mara and Turkanna, and abundant wildlife, has led to tourism becoming Kenya’s principal industry.

Major exports of tea, coffee, and petroleum products have contributed to recent economic growth of 5.8% in 2005 and 6.1% in 2006. Over the past ten years Kenya has witnessed an overall decline in levels of absolute poverty from 52.3% in 1997 to 46.1% in 2005/6.

Despite the progress just under one in five of Kenya’s 34.3 million population continue to live in extreme poverty and struggle to meet their basic needs of food, shelter, fuel, and clothing.

Life expectancy is currently 45 years, more than one in ten children die before their fifth birthday, just under 6% of the adult population live with HIV/AIDS, and for every 100,000 births more than 400 women die in childbirth (the rate in the UK is less than 10). Kenya’s capital city Nairobi is also home to Africa’s largest and poorest slum, Kibera.

Levels of inequality also remain high in rural areas, particularly those in the north which is home to a disproportionate number of Kenya’s poor. The main factors leading to poverty in the north are a lack of infrastructure such as good roads and a series of severe droughts in recent years which have destroyed food crops, killed livestock, and forced many of the subsistence farmers to relocate to urban centres to seek food and employment. Recent reports from SCIAF personnel travelling in the area heard accounts of increased droughts and flash floods becoming more frequent which inhabitants believe are indicative of climate change.

Kenya is making some positive progress towards a number of the Millennium Development Goals with 86% of all primary school aged children enrolled in school education and 83% of girls staying in education to 11 years old (Grade 5).

The country’s HIV/AIDS strategy has seen the disease fall from over 11% to 6.1% in the last five years with a dramatic increase in the numbers receiving antiretroviral drugs in the past two years.

The country’s key development challenges include addressing a run down infrastructure, weak institutions, corruption, high unemployment, ethnic divisions, and child mortality. Kenya remains a highly unequal society and large swaths of the population are subject to chronic hunger, with 3.5 million Kenyans in need of food assistance.

SCIAF has been working with partners in Kenya for over 25 years and currently supports the projects of three partners addressing HIV/AIDS and promoting food security. In 2006/07 SCIAF provided funding grants totalling £91,933.

January 2007