How good political leadership can use education to eradicate poverty

The death of Kenya’s third President Mwai Kibaki brings to mind his government’s attempts to improve the economy. It is during his reign that statistics to inform and support policy decisions were extensively used in government. I will give three examples.

First, in 2003, the Ministry of Planning and National Development’s Central Bureau of Statistics released a well-illustrated informative document, “Geographical Dimensions of Well-Being in Kenya: Where are the poor?”

The manuscript indicated the percentage of poor people in every location — except then-North Eastern Province. Central Province had a 31 per cent people living below the poverty line. Coast had 61 per cent, Eastern 58 per cent, Nyanza 64 per cent, Rift Valley 48 per cent and Western 60 per cent. Within each district, there were corresponding figures. In Baringo, for example, the figures varied from Korosi at 73 per cent to Kabiyet 28 per cent. 

These statistics were meant to assist policymakers to target the poor regions for deployment of resources to reduce poverty and bridge the poverty gap among regions.

Secondly, the development and adoption of Kenya Vision 2030 was a major step towards economic prosperity. The annual targets for every pillar of the vision were set and agreed upon. One of them was the overhaul of the Constitution — which was achieved in 2010, leading to the establishment of county governments that are expected to work towards poverty reduction in their jurisdictions.

Thirdly, introduction of performance contracting in the Kibaki regime was intended to improve service delivery among public servants to confirm their level of performance. At Independence in 1963, the Jomo Kenyatta government resolved to fight “ignorance, disease and poverty”. The population was seven million. In 2021, shows Statistica, 16 per cent of Kenyans lived below $1.90 a day. These are considered to be living in extreme poverty. 

Reduce poverty

With an estimated 50 million Kenyans, it implies that by 2021 eight million Kenyans were in this category, which is higher than the entire population in1963. One would then wonder whether the fight against poverty has achieved much in those 60 years. How come we have stagnated for this long? And how can we come out of it?

First, Kenya has achieved a lot in the field of education. An educated person is expected, by virtue of their education, to analyse the situation of their community and find ways and means of helping to reduce poverty through income-generating projects. 

It is these people who are recruited to hold senior policy-making positions at the national and county levels in the belief and trust that they have the skills and interest to uplift the lot of their kin. That is what development, or leadership, is all about. Furthermore, in the performance management era, there is no better measure of assessing performance than the number of people who have been lifted out of extreme poverty.

Secondly, the devolved system of governance provides a good opportunity for leaders to focus on poverty reduction within their areas. In honour of President Kibaki’s poverty reduction efforts, I challenge members of the national and county assemblies and governors to assume that they are ‘presidents’ of their areas of jurisdiction and focus on ways and means of reducing poverty.

That takes us to the present situation. It is shocking, and tragic, that hardly any of the aspirants of elective positions state clearly, in definitive figures, their targets (if any) for poverty reduction and income generation.

It is even more disheartening that the electorate do not engage the aspirants to commit to setting such targets but instead focus on discussing them in terms of their tribe, clan, race, geographic origin and religion.

The institutions of government that have custody of demographic data should not only make them liberally available for public scrutiny but carry out civic education about them. Let every ward, constituency and county have a 20-30-year vision for development henceforth. That way, Kenya, as a collection of 47 developing counties, will develop.

Mr Sogomo, an education expert, is a former Secretary of TSC. [email protected]. @Bsogomo