Kenya

Kenya’s Road to Sustainable and Inclusive Development

Felistus Mbole | 2017

Abstract

Sustainable development is inclusive development. As economies advance from being agrarian to services-based as is expected with the continual social change for the better, human capital is becoming the most important asset of every nation. Sustainable and inclusive development policy interventions are thus those that are targeted at enabling most of the citizens to contribute to the economic growth of their country and to share in this growth. Such interventions entail building the human capital stock of the nation through education and training Kenya’s past economic performance has been minimal, chequered, and unequally distributed. Its current development roadmap, Vision 2030, has little prospects of delivering the rapid, lasting, and wide-ranging growth that typifies sustainable development. A look at Malaysia, a globally acknowledged development success story and Kenya’s peer in many aspects in the 1960s, shows a wide divergence in their growth from the early 1980s. This project applies evidence and lessons from Kenya’s past and Malaysia to build a human capital model for sustainable development. Based on this model, the project then uses scenario analysis to identify credible and practical policy interventions to get Kenya on to the path for sustainable and inclusive growth in the future.