Agriculture still holds the key to poverty jinx

Poverty eradication is a goal the government has always set its sights on for self-sufficiency in food production and prosperity. After all, no government worth its salt would wish to see the citizens in the grip of helplessness and unable to make ends meet.

While it is good to create jobs for the people to earn some income and thus afford their basic needs, low-quality jobs are a mockery of these efforts. They erode the gains in the anti-poverty drive.

Kenyans need jobs to improve their lives, as they cater for their families and contribute to community and national development.

However, the proliferation of low-wage informal sector jobs is not exactly what the country needs. They can give false hope while not making any tangible contribution.

A new World Bank report assessing the country’s poverty and equity reveals that the rate of poverty reduction has slowed down since 2019. That simply means the plans to lift Kenyans out of abject poverty have a minimal impact. The biggest irony is that this has happened despite the transformation of the economy away from the traditional agricultural sector.

According to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics data, the country made the most progress in poverty reduction between 2005 and 2015. Then, the absolute poverty level declined from 46.7 per cent to 36.1 per cent.

The number of poor individuals fell from 16.5 million to 15.8 million as the population grew. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic eroded all that with the number of poor people increasing to 20.9 per cent. This stuck above the pre-pandemic levels, at 19.1 million, in 2021.

Economic transformation has resulted in the services sector becoming the engine of growth but the poor have not benefited as they remain in informal less-productive engagements.

But there is no magic wand, as the World Bank report has also just confirmed that the solution to this challenge is the transformation of agriculture, which has always been the backbone of the economy, and the services sector. The two hold the key to poverty reduction.