Understanding Economic Inequality In Kenya
From my prepubescent age, I struggled to understand why my mother couldn’t buy me new clothes for Christmas. I was embarrassed coming out with my over-sized home-tailored pants and second-hand shirt, as my friends swaggered around the neighborhood in new pieces of denim. On some days, I would get mad and ransack her purse but I would end up guilt-stricken after finding that she had earned less than $2 at the end of the day. My mother is a seamstress in Gikomba market who works more than 80 hours a week and still struggles to make ends meet, so I have to send her part of my college stipend for upkeep. My family has been crippled with generational poverty and illiteracy, only a handful have managed to get vocational training and secure blue-collar jobs. My fallacious reasoning was that we had been cursed, until now that I have wrapped my head around the impact of economic inequality. Economic inequality is broadly the gap between income and wealth accumulated by different groups in the society. It perpetuates generational poverty.
The Colonial Era
Kenya is highly ranked among the top countries in the world in terms of inequality. 0.1% of Kenyans own more wealth than 99% of the population while 36.1% (2015) of its population lives below the international poverty line. Kenya is an agricultural economy with the sector providing full or…
