Kenya Poverty and Gender Assessment 2015-2016

The substantive economic growth of the last decade has brought Kenya into the low middle-income country category in 2014. For the period of focus of this report, 2005/06 to 2015/16, growth in Kenya averaged 5.3 percent, higher than the 4.9 percent observed for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. Overall, growth was powered by the service sector, which now accounts for almost half of the nation’s GDP. The remarkable expansion of telecommunication and mobile-based financial services shifted the economic paradigm of Kenya to an extent rarely seen in developing economies. Moreover, the country was capable of bouncing back from the violent political outbreak that followed the 2007 presidential election, from the effects of the 2008/09 global financial crisis, and from the harsh drought conditions experienced by most of the African Horn in 2011, aggravated by the increase in the international price of oil.