FROM BEING REGARDES as a success story in the early post-colonial period, average incomes in Kenya have fallen dramatically in the 1990s. Only two countries in Africa, Sierra Leone and South Africa, have a more unequal distribution of income. This book presents a detailed analysis of poverty in contemporary Kenya. The author estimates the distribution of income in 1988 based on large sample surveys – the 1988 Rural Labour Force Survey and the 1986 Urban Labour Force Survey. His findings show the extent of inequality which is very large, even when compared to other countries that are often cited as being highly inegalitarian, such as Brazil. They also show that intra-rural inequality is higher than intra-urban inequality, suggesting that, contrary to frequent assumptions, the rural sector is not homogeneous.
Land, gender and education are central to differences in income. Land inequality refers not only to the amount of land owned but also to its quality and therefore, its productivity. Education is highly correlated to earnings in both rural and urban areas. In the rural areas, it is crucial to obtain wage employment which, in turn, enables rural households to specialize in cash crops and thus increase their earnings. Education may also improve actual labour productivity in farming. In the urban areas, education is highly correlated to types of employment and to earnings.
The heterogeneity of the rural population with regard to production, skills, incomes and endowments means that not all rural people have the same ability to migrate. The urban centres are also not homogenous, with different degrees of industrialization which require migrants with different skills levels. The character and effects of rural-urban migration are thus much more complex that is often theorized. The differences between the incomes received by women and by men are important: women in wage employment receive less than their male counterparts with similar qualifications. In the rural areas, access to land and to labour are important factors, as women tend to have smaller holdings and women-headed families are usually smaller. A detailed analysis of individual time allocation within households shows that rural Kenya’s gender division of labour affects productive and reproductive activities, and that children contribute substantially to household production. When rural and urban households are compared, some similarities emerge. In both, women work longer hours than men; the poor have fewer opportunities than the rich; and income is related to the degree of household participation in the market.
The final chapter describes rural households’ characteristics and points out that while there are many households which can be defined as peasant (relying entirely on family farms and on family labour) and a sizeable proportion of rural households depend solely on wage employment, over 40 per cent fall somewhere between these two categories and rely on a highly heterogeneous mix of activities for their livelihoods. This has important policy implications, since poverty reduction initiatives risk benefiting some groups but having a negative impact on others and, more crucially, having little correspondence to African reality.