Parents running out of land for their children

Farmers in rural areas are increasingly running out of arable land to leave their children.

According to data from the Population Reference Bureau, 67 per cent of rural farmers believe that their land is insufficient for their offspring.

This is one the greatest indications that a rising population, mostly comprised of young people, threatens to sink families in poverty as they seek to support more dependants.

Currently, each woman in Kenya is on average giving birth to more than four children during her reproductive age— indicating that the population is likely to keep increasing.

The statistics are a bad sign for the country’s economy, which heavily relies on agriculture. Currently,  70 per cent of Kenyans live in the rural areas.

According to Kenya Land Alliance  boss Odenda Lumumba, the land problem stemmed from land fragmentation.

“We have seen land being subdivided into very uneconomical sizes that one cannot do anything with it,” he says.

Some of the areas that are most affected by scarcity of land are Kisii and Maragoli in Vihiga.

The new Constitution only provides that Parliament legislates the minimum and maximum acreage an individual can hold.

The Agricultural Land Act states that the minimum acreage that arable land can be divided into is 4.5 acres.