Kenya: Ministers Dismiss New UN Findings On Poverty

from All Africa

The Nation (Nairobi)

Jeff Otieno
Nairobi

The Government has dismissed the new United Nations report that revealed shocking disparities between Kenya's richest and poorest regions.

Cabinet ministers Amos Kimunya and Henry Obwocha said the report lacked factual data and only relied on outdated statistics.

UNDP deputy resident representative Nardos Bekele-Thomas during the launch of the Human Development Report on Tuesday. The Government said it was on outdated data. Photo/ Chris Ojow .

Mr Kimunya, who read a Government statement, said the figures on poverty in the country were based on welfare monitoring surveys of 1997.

"This means that the poverty diagnostics cited in the report are based on figures which have indeed changed," the minister who spoke during a Press conference at Treasury Building on Wednesday said.

He said the Government will soon release factual data on poverty following the finalisation of the analysis of the Kenya Integrated Household Survey.

The United Nations Development Programme report released last Tuesday revealed that four out of the country's eight provinces recorded an increase in poverty levels in 2005.

Mr Kimunya said most of the data used in deriving various human development index were from surveys/census which were carried out in the 1990s

"When the Kenya Integrated Household Survey is concluded, it will enable the country to update poverty profiles, consumer price index and national accounts data," Mr Kimunya said.

The minister said the data used to determine inequality were based on facts and figures that were published by the Society for International Development in 2004 in the report entitled Pulling Apart: Facts and Figures on equality in Kenya "but which itself used data from various sources, all dating to 2003".

Kimunya and Obwocha said the Kenyan economy enjoyed a broadbased expansion touching all sectors of the economy as had been correctly noted in the UNDP report.

They said the real GDP improved to 5.8 per cent in 2005 up from 0.6 per cent in 2002 adding that preliminary data for this year showed that the economy grew by about six per cent.

The UNDP report examined seven realms of the human security that included economic, health, food, community, political, personal and environmental which were measured using mathematical models to come up with a summary measure of human development.

Mr Obwocha said the Constituency Development Fund has improved the lives of Kenyans at the grassroots noting its allocation had increased from Sh1.2 billion in financial year 2003/04 to Sh10 billion in the 2006/07.