Business Daily (Nairobi)
Jim Onyango
3 September 2007
Nairobi — Despite dropping by a quarter over the last two decades, the rate at which the Kenyan population is growing remains a major impediment to attempts to sustain steady economic growth for the next generation.
Planning minister Henry Obwocha reckons that population control is a key factor in building a sound foundation for long- term economic growth. "It remains too high for the current rate of growth," he said at a media briefing in Nairobi.
Kenya's economy has picked up in the last four years, but is yet to reach a growth rate of eight per cent required for at least 15 years before the country can claim an industrial nation status under the Vision 2030 initiative.
The economy has picked up from negative 0.4 per cent in 2002 to 2.8 per cent in 2003 and 4.3 per cent in 2004. The momentum was sustained in 2005 by a 5.7 per cent growth, which improved to 6.1 per cent last year and is projected at 6.5 per cent this year.
That growth has meant a reduction in poverty levels from 56 per cent in 2002 to 46 per cent in 2006, but this cannot be sustained if the population growth takes an upward trend.
The government is preparing to splash out Sh7 billion on a national population census in two years with no clear indication of the current numbers since the last two censuses were bungled by political considerations.
Experts project that Kenya's population will stand at 40 million people by then up from the current 33 million, some estimates say 35 million, causing strains on families and individuals.
The higher population will also provide a reality check on the sustenance of government policies such as free education up to secondary level and free medical care at government hospitals for selected ailments.
The pressure of such a population explosion would limit employment opportunities, result in rising costs for education, health services, and food imports and an inability to generate resources to build housing in both urban and rural areas, Dr Kamal Mustafa a population scientist with the United Nations Population Fund told the Business Daily yesterday.
Compared to some industrialized states where the majority of the population is ageing, experts say that Kenya's population pressure comes from the fact more than half is composed of individuals under 30 years and actively looking for gainful economic activities.
At a meeting with population scientists yesterday Mr Obwocha sounded the alarm that the accelerating population growth should be slowed down as it cannot match the economic expansion.
Unlike many of the newly industrialised country's that Kenya is aspiring to be, it has none of the drastic birth control measures like the number of children each family should bear and relies largely on voluntary family planning methods.
Though successful to a large extent, the methods distort the structure of the population in favour of the poor who tend to bring forth more children. The relatively rich and well educated lot, in the meantime, take up the birth control measures, aggravating the dependency ratio in future generations.
"The poor will feel the pinch of the population growth. Population growth not withstanding, the most important issue is to improve the quality of life for the poor," said Dr Mustafa.
Dr Obwocha said the causes of the country's explosive growth in population were sharp falls in mortality rates-especially infant -and the traditional preference for large families.
According to UNFPA, Kenya was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to view runaway population growth as a serious impediment to economic prosperity, and it became the first, in the late 1960s, to begin developing a national family-planning campaign.
The country is experiencing a population surge despite having developed an official population policy: the National population Policy for Sustainable Development which calls for matching population size with available resources yet leaves decisions on family size up to individual families.
While the Kenyan government has attempted to formulate official strategies on family planning, promotion of the message and means of family planning fall largely on the local health-care offices and nongovernmental organizations.
Kenya's population policy tends to frame the need for family planning around the self-evident realities of population growth such as overuse of land and scarcity of jobs.
The policy also aims at demystifying contraceptive methods and providing assurance of their safety and utility, especially in rural areas, where suspicion and misunderstanding are common.
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