[Kenya] Poverty highest where education level is low

From The Kenyan Standard

By Noel Wandera

Gonzi Rai’s Ganze Constituency is the worst hit by poverty in Kenya, a new report has revealed.

The report on poverty and inequality released by Government yesterday presents a preliminary socio-economic profile of poverty for the urban and rural population.

It derives the findings based on the level of education and gender of the household heads based on the 1999 population and the housing census data.

The report says poverty is high across all households in Ganze, whether led by the uneducated, those with primary education or those who have attained post-primary education.

Thus, poverty incidence in houses where the head has no education was 89 per cent, primary education 79 per cent and secondary and above 65 per cent.

In generally, the socio-economic dimensions of the constituency profile indicate that households headed by individuals with secondary education or above have less poverty compared to those headed by individuals with primary education.

Overall, the emerging spatial pattern reveals that controlling for education attainment of the household head, poverty rates vary substantially among constituencies.

According to the report, households in Kuria Constituency whose households heads have primary education are three times as likely to be poor compared to households in Githunguri constituency that are headed by persons that never went to school.

"This is suggestive of substantial variation in the returns to higher education across rural constituencies in Kenya," says the report.

In all of Kenya’s 210 constituencies, households headed by individuals with no education have the highest poverty incidence, a pattern that is replicated in urban and rural residents.

In contrast to Ganze, Githunguri Constituency in Central Province has the lowest incidence of poverty among rural households headed by a member with no education, with the incidents rated at 27 per cent.

The poverty incidences among rural households whose heads have primary education ranges from 20 per cent in Kabete Constituency in Central Province to 82 per cent in Kuria Constituency, Nyanza Province.

Kabete residents whose rural households are headed by people with post-primary school educational attainment shows the least rate of poverty — a mere 1 per cent — while in a similar scenario, seven out of every 10 households from Kuria Constituency in Nyanza Province experience the highest poverty rates of 79 per cent.

Among urban households, poverty incidents for households headed by persons with no education varies from a low of 10 per cent among the urban residents of Maragwa Constituency in Central Province to almost 100 per cent of the urban residents of Nyaribari Masaba Constituency in Nyanza Province.