Leaving no one behind – Kenya is a pioneer in living up to the central, transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals.
In support of these efforts to informing holistic approaches of enhancing wellbeing of its citizens, and monitoring SDGs, as part of the project “Trends and drivers of wellbeing outcomes in Kenya with a focus on children and women”, two of our team members, Erëblina Elezaj and Míriam Carrera joined Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), UNICEF, UN WOMEN Kenya, KIPPRA (The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis) and sector representatives for a capacity building workshop in Naivasha, Kenya from July 24th – August 3rd.
In addition to the technical training, the workshop included sessions on the conceptual framework of inequality measurement, discussions about and selection of parameters of inequality for different age groups following the lifecycle approach, and presentation of preliminary results on nonmonetary inequality wellbeing outcomes using the 10% subsamples from 2009 and 2019 census data. In the second part of the workshop, the participants worked in groups organized by sectors – education and training, child protection, economic activity, information, health, water and sanitation, and housing and energy – to start drafting chapters of the forthcoming report.
Using data from 2009 and 2019 and Kenya Household Integrated Budget Survey (2004-05 and 2015-16) for the analysis, the first project component, “Trends in inequality in Kenya across time and space”, is highly relevant for the country’s policymaking processes at the national and county level: 1) Monetary and nonmonetary wellbeing outcomes are measured for the entire population, ii) Estimates are available for low levels of administration and for multiple characteristics, unveiling intersecting inequalities and the population groups left furthest behind, and 3) It tracks the country’s progress in reducing inequality since devolution, and 4) It enables monitoring SDG 10.
As the first report is nearing completion, our team is simultaneously working on the other project components that examine the relationship between children’s and women’s wellbeing outcomes and public finance and service delivery, the effect of shocks (COVID-19 pandemic, locust infestation and climate change) on households and children, and the effect of the wellbeing outcomes across different lifecycle stages in future outcomes using cohort analysis.
