Poverty Kenya Template 19/10/03 10:19 AM Page 9
Chapter One: Introduction
Governments all over the world are faced with challenges relating to design, implementation, moni-
toring and evaluation of poverty reducing development policies in the wake of dwindling national resources.
This requires detailed time series information on well being disaggregated by administrative units as well as
socio-economic and cognate characteristics to improve targeting and enhance appropriate use of the meagre
resources available for poverty reduction. The need for such area-specific information is emerging from the
rapidly changing policy environment that is progressively becoming more decentralised with increased
autonomy and accountability at sub-National levels.
Geographic targeting of subsidies, for example, has been shown elsewhere to be effective at max-
imising the coverage of the poor while minimising leakage to the non-poor. Poverty mapping has become,
therefore, an integral part of the development planning process. Poverty maps are spatial descriptions of the
distribution of poverty, providing a powerful, visually-oriented framework for integrating data from various
sources, including surveys, censuses and satellite imagery, as well as social, economic and environmental
data. By integrating spatial measures of poverty with other data, spatial patterns of well being can be com-
pared with educational levels, access to services, market integration and other possible contributing factors,
leading to a more complete understanding of different dimensions of human well-being. Poverty maps,
therefore, provide a tool for helping both Government and non-governmental and multilateral organizations
with the targeting of community welfare programmes and, thus, support efforts to decentralise national
resources to facilitate localised decision-making. However, poverty maps themselves provide only indica-
tions of poverty, not its root causes. Thus, widespread dissemination of this information is critical so that it
can be linked with more detailed contextual information on key socio-economic, environmental and policy
relevant indicators (e.g. access to public services and education) and therefore used to improve poverty-
related decision-making.
The spatial framework also allows the use of new units of analyses. Instead of using administrative
boundaries, analysts can designate ecological boundaries for instance capture information on community-
or watershed-level characteristics. The use of poverty maps to identify such spatial patterns could provide
new insights into the causes of poverty between the community and individual household-levels. For exam-
ple, how far are physical isolation and poor agro-ecological endowments trapping whole communities into
poverty? Prior analyses of the WMSs data suggest that education is a very important factor in explaining rel-
ative poverty levels of households, but to what extent does it explain variations in poverty levels compared
to, say, the distance to a wholesale market or access to water that the community as a whole experiences?
In order to tackle this and other similar issues, there is need for a measure of well being at a higher disaggre-
gated level than has been possible in the past. In other words, high-resolution poverty estimates will allow
analysts to tease out the relative importance of the factors underlying the various poverty incidences at dif-
ferent levels of aggregation.
The foregoing, in addition to the desire to see data already collected become more useful and used,
should help invest more in capacity building within CBS to improve their data collection instruments and
analytical capacity in this area. These were some of the motivating factors behind the multi-organisation and
multi-disciplinary effort to produce high-resolution poverty maps for Kenya. ILRI, in collaboration with CBS
and The Rockefeller Foundation, initiated an international workshop that examined the feasibility of a
poverty mapping research for Kenya similar to those undertaken with support from the World Bank and the
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in many other countries (throughout Latin America and
in South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar). This led to the establishment of a technical
research team within CBS with technical support from World Bank and ILRI researchers, and a policy advi-
sory team drawn from the CBS, Poverty Eradication Commission and the University of Nairobi. With these
efforts, the poverty mapping research commenced in 2001.
This report is, therefore, the culmination of a deeply collaborative and spirited effort to provide high-
ly disaggregated and all encompassing poverty maps for Kenya. It is intended for policy makers - from
national level down to the community levels – to help in addressing the large economic and social develop-
ment challenges facing Kenya. In particular, the report will be extremely useful for the Poverty Eradication
Commission, the PRSP Secretariat and all persons involved in the implementation of the PRSP. We would
also like to recognise that the civil society and the foreign and international organisations operating in Kenya
all have key roles to play in the policy debate geared to tackling poverty-related challenges. The information
contained in this report will facilitate the debate regarding Kenya’s future development possibilities.
Therefore, the report must be distributed, widely not only to government officials, but also to non-govern-
mental and civil society organisations, economic and social researchers, educational institutions and devel-
opment partners, among others.
The report is the first in a series of reports planned in the area of poverty measurement. Further
reports will examine, for instance, the relationship between these poverty estimates and various community
or household level characteristics, which will follow in subsequent volumes. Readers interested in the
details of the econometric methods and data used in this analysis should refer to the bibliography.
The rest of the report is organised as follows. Chapter Two provides concepts, data and the methods
used. Each of the different poverty measures is described alongside a specific map with suggestions on how
to use and interpret each of the different poverty maps. The main aim of this report is to guide readers to
ponder questions that would facilitate further research on the factors behind these spatial differences in
poverty, thus very little interpretation has been given in this report. Chapter Three, however, presents some
observations of key findings, followed by a brief summary of results by Province. Chapter Four presents the
1
poverty maps, starting with the Kenya-wide maps, followed by maps that ‘zoom in’ to each Province. Some
of the Provinces are broken into two or more areas since they are so large (see Figure 4.1). Each of the
Province or sub-Province maps shows Division and Location level estimates of several measures of poverty.
They include the headcount index (percentage of the population below the poverty line), the contribution to
poverty (percentage of a District’s poor population found in each Division or Location of that District) and
the poverty gap (the distance poor people have to go to reach the poverty line, measured as a percentage of
the poverty line). Finally, Chapter Five contains tables showing the headcount index, poverty gap and esti-
mated number of poor individuals by Province, District, Division and Location.