Million Kenyans do away with Poverty

In 2021, a little over a million Kenyans were able to escape poverty as the country’s economy recovered from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which had caused many people to lose their jobs.

According to a new report on poverty from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), 19.1 million Kenyans lived below the poverty line in 2021, down from 20.9 million in 2020, which suggests that the economy is recovering.

With an adult’s total monthly consumption of less than Sh3,947 in rural areas and less than Sh7,193 in urban areas, this translates to 38.6 percent of the population living in poverty.

“In 2021, the overall poverty rate was 38.6 percent compared to 36.1 percent in 2015/16. However, this is a reduction compared to poverty rate of 42.9 percent in 2020. This indicates that 19.1 million individuals were poor in 2021,” said the Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury, Professor Njuguna Ndung’u, Thursday.

Those who lost their jobs in 2020 were able to find gainful employment as a result of the economy’s recovery, but analysts predict that it will take longer for real wages—measured against inflation—to recover.

The rural poor

According to the KNBS survey, 13.7 million people live below the poverty line in rural areas, compared to 5.4 people in urban areas like Nairobi and Mombasa.

A third of Kenyan households are food poor, according to the poverty rates for 2021, which estimate that 15.1 million Kenyans cannot afford to put food on the table.

If a person consumes less than Sh2,331 per month in rural areas and Sh2,905 per month in urban areas, they are deemed to be food insecure.

The administration of President William Ruto, which assumed control in September of last year, vowed to reduce poverty by generating jobs.

The Kenya Kwanza government declared that it would increase food security through its Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) by making large-scale irrigation investments and making affordable fertiliser available to farmers to lower the cost of production.