The road less travelled: Kenya in 2025

In one of the English-speaking world’s more famous passages, published in 1916, the American poet Robert Frost writes:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

The road that Kenya chose in 1963 with the Lancaster House Conference was well travelled, but with the many disastrous amendments to the Constitution, coupled with the wrong political and economic choices that we made, it was clearly a wrong turn.

So, looking back in 2025, five years before the 2030 goal we have set of becoming a middle-income developing country, where would the path that we are now choosing, in 2010, have led us? It is impossible to see clearly that far into the future, but where we stand in the power structure among the nations of the world will be an influential external factor.

Kenya today is ranked among the poorest nations in the world. In the past two years, we have been rated alongside failed states like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chad. Our country has little influence in shaping major events around the world, compared with America, Britain, Russia and China, or emerging giants like India and Brazil.

However, Kenya’s positioning as a regional powerhouse will carry a lot of weight in the emerging world order. Its ability to cultivate its position in the region to advance its national interest around the world will depend heavily on how it can cultivate stronger bonds of friendships with all its neighbours.

By national interest, we mean our ability to grow our economy fast enough to generate enough jobs to meet the rising demand of our young population and make an impact on fighting poverty. Meeting this goal will help secure our borders from outside aggression, international terrorism and organised transnational crime.

Locally, a prosperous society will be an insurance policy against petty thieves, organised terror gangs, drug lords, official corruption, and petty political rebellions. In trying to envision where Kenya will be in 2025, it is useful to look at our situation in the context of the world at that time.

According to conventional wisdom in political science, the United States of America will still be the undisputed military and economic superpower in an increasingly multipolar world in 2025. The economic might of second-tier nations such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and possibly South Africa will collectively be starting to eclipse the First World and these nations will be demanding a larger say in global governance through such institutions as the UN Security Council, the World Bank and within the G-20 club.

At the heart of the changing economic fortunes of the developed world and second-tier nations is the historic shift in the world’s demographics. The West will experience a dramatic ageing of its population, which will shrink its labour pool and productivity, constraining economic growth.

This will shift economic power to developing countries, which will be experiencing a baby boom powered by a large supply of youthful labour, whose productivity will hopefully be boosted by better education, healthcare, and technology. While the impact of the ageing population is now beginning to be widely understood, experts are barely scratching the surface in explaining the potential and the danger that lurks within Africa and Kenya’s baby boom over the next two decades.

Current and future dangers

This is the Kenya of 2025 as defined by the influential United Nations dataset, World Population Prospects: 2008 Revision. Over the next 15 years, 17 million babies will be born, bringing Kenya’s population to 57 million; as the fertility rate declines, it will settle at 85 million by 2050.

While Kenya’s population will be growing at a healthy rate, over the next decades, our neighbours will start eclipsing us as our fertility rate falls faster than theirs and as their economic prospects are boosted by natural resources endowments such as minerals and petroleum. By 2025, Uganda’s population will have risen from 34 million to 53 million and to 91 million in 2050. Tanzanians will have grown from 45 million in 2010, to 109 million people in 2050.

While a rising, well-educated young population signals growing economic power, the Kenya of the next two decades will face two major challenges that could weaken the state if radical steps are not taken to accelerate economic growth across all regions. This is the problem of millions of idle and poorly educated youth living in sprawling urban centres.

In 2025, 70 per cent of Kenyans will be living in urban areas and of this population over 90 per cent will reside in a slum. Nationally, though the basic human development indicators are projected to improve, the alleviation of mass poverty and suffering will just be marginal. Thus, life expectancy at birth will have improved from 56 to just 60 years.

In the next five years, we can expect 1.1 million teenage girls to become pregnant, which is equivalent to the number of 30-34 years olds giving birth. By 2025, 1.2 million teens will become pregnant. The picture in terms of maternal health and the incidence of babies dying at birth or too early in life will remain as ugly, though slightly improved.

For instance, of the 1.6 million babies we expect to be born in the next five years, 92,000 will die at birth, and 114,000 will not live to enter pre-school at age five. The situation in terms of infant mortality will not have changed much by 2025, but the number of children dying before reaching age five will have fallen to 116,800.

It is easy to find similar data that paint a grim picture of the number of Kenyans living on less than three nutritious meals a day, who have no easy access to healthcare, who have no modern sanitation, piped water or live next to filth in a shantytown. Kenya’s median age will have improved slightly from 18 to 20 years, but an increasing supply of these poor and uneducated young people will see them drawn to crime, drugs, gangs, violence, religious radicalisation, petty rebellion, and even violent revolution.