Dilemma over growing number of elderly folk

Struggling to keep in check the ballooning population that reached 41.6 million people on Monday, Kenya has been warned to prepare for another crisis — taking care of a rapidly rising number of older people.

New statistics released by the United Nations this week show that women who have attained the age of 55 can now, on average, expect to live for 24 more years.

On average, that means that many of the current 57-year-olds will live till the age of 81.

It means that since most of the working class in the public sector retire at the age of 60, the rest of their lives will present a headache for the government and their families.

Few of the older people have adequate pensions while the cash handouts from the government to the elderly are inadequate.

The State of the Kenya Population 2011: Kenyan’s 41 Million People: Challenges and Possibilities report released on Monday, warns that the large number of youth will age in a few years.

According to the report, there are glaring signs that the number of people aged 55 and above has grown rapidly.

Dramatic rise

“There has been a dramatic rise in the population aged 55 and above,” the report says. That number, which was only 1.7 million in 1999, increased by a million by the 2009 census.

It now stands at about 2.6 million, representing an annual growth rate of about four per cent a year. The figure has defied earlier estimates that showed the number of older people would reach 2.2 million in 2020.

According to the report, the number of years people are expected to live has been rising, especially for women. “A woman who reaches her 55th birthday expects to live for another 24 years on average,” says the report.

“This is cause for worry,” said the UN Population Fund assistant representative at the Kenya country office, Ms Cecilia Kimemia.

She said urgent measures must taken to prevent an old age crisis. “We need an urgent policy to help us tackle the impending crisis,” she said.
Officially, people aged 60 years and above are classified as elderly.

The increasing proportion of the population considered elderly has implications on social protection. Today, most senior citizens are cared for by their families.

Unfortunately, younger family members migrate from their rural homes to urban areas in search of jobs, leaving their older parents struggling to take care of themselves.

Locally, welfare-state institutions are in their infancy given that old-age security has been the responsibility of families. “Broad-based provisions for old-age security have yet to emerge,” the report says.

“Only a minority of employees, chiefly in the public sector, are covered by pension schemes,” it says.

With increasing numbers of the elderly, coupled with a breakdown in family structures that used to support them, the absence of old age social security is glaring.

The Gender and Social Services ministry has been working hard to put together a national policy on aging and older people.

The national policy on older people has been tabled in Parliament and seeks to tap senior citizen’s vast experience to create self-employment in their fields of expertise.

If approved, the policy’s food, public transport and housing incentives will put a smile on the faces of those above 60 years.

The policy provides for post-retirement employment and favoured treatment at hospitals.

A social welfare official at the Gender ministry, Ms Julliet Kola, said the policy would guide the government on issues concerning older people. “We have focused on the youth and completely ignored the elderly, “ Ms Kola said.
In a smaller way, the ministry has come up with a social grant, the old-age cash transfer, to alleviate poverty among senior citizens and over the past four years, the government has been giving 33,000 elderly Kenyans a stipend of Sh1,500 each.

But the government this year announced it was increasing the number of people who will receive the stipend.

We established yesterday that this would now be 48,000 selected from 72 districts, up from the current 33. In Kenya, poverty is measured by the amount of money one needs to buy food for minimum nutritional requirements.

A person living in a rural area needs Sh1,562 while in a town it’s Sh2,913 a month. Anyone who spends less than this on food is regarded as poor.

Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta, in his budget estimates in June, increased the total allocation to the stipend by Sh470 million to Sh1 billion.

Mr Kenyatta directed that the pilot phase of the programme be expanded to cover 20 households per constituency.

Besides, he said, beneficiaries would have their stipends increased from Sh1,500 to Sh2,000 a month. It is for senior citizens above 65 years.

They are picked based on poverty levels and other factors such as whether or not they are taking care of orphans.

Yesterday, HelpAge Kenya, the organisation that works with elderly people, called on the government to extend the cash stipend to all senior citizens countrywide.

Mr Erastus Maina, a project officer at the organisation, criticised the criteria of using district poverty levels to select who to give.

“We need to make the programme universal,” he said. “It is wrong to pick beneficiaries based on poverty levels of districts when it is possible to find a poor person even in the richest region.”

He said it is wrong to pilot stipends in a country where most old people are hungry. “Household poverty cannot be a basis of choosing those to be covered since all old people need the stipend,” said Mr Maina.

He supported a motion in Parliament last week where MPs termed it discriminatory. The MPs called for an extensio of the stipend to cover all parts of the country.

Earlier, the MPs passed a motion which if implemented would see more than 1.8 million Kenyans above 60 being paid Sh2,000 a month.

Indications that the number of elderly people will go up came when the UN predicted that the life expectancy of Kenyans is expected to increase to 69 years from 56 years.

This increase has been mostly attributed to the advances made in reducing the spread of HIV/Aids, according to the UN population body.