Investing in Kenya’s People: Valuing the Benefits of the U.S.-Kenya Relationship Chapter 4 (Part 1 of 3)

Chapter 4 What are the real and perceived benefits of partnering with the United States to Kenya’s progress towards Vision 2030?

Thus far, we have examined U.S. contributions to Kenya’s growth and prosperity in a fairly bounded way—dollars mobilized annually on average via a number of public, private, and individual sources. However, the United States-Kenya partnership is about more than financing alone. At the end of the day, both countries have a shared interest in seeing Kenya make real progress against its economic, social, and governance goals in line with its Vision 2030 plan.

In this chapter, we review Kenya’s progress in three prominent areas of U.S. engagement—health, democracy and governance, and agricultural productivity—to trace how partnering with the United States may contribute practically to improvements Kenyan people see in their daily lives. We also surveyed Kenyan leaders working across 14 sectors and 5 stakeholder groups to gauge how they perceived the United States’ contributions to helping Kenya achieve its goals. Our 2020 Kenya Snap Poll asked public, private, and civil society leaders to share their views on the level of U.S. activity they see in their sector, the significance of U.S. contributions to Kenya’s development progress, and their preferred development model for their country.

Section 4.1 How does the United States-Kenya partnership benefit the Kenyan people in their daily lives?

To answer this question, we examine three discrete examples from sectors where the United States has concentrated a disproportionate share of its financial and technical assistance to Kenya over the last two decades:

• First, we look at Kenya’s performance over time on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment as part of its social and health objectives. Kenya’s health sector overall, and its efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in particular, has historically attracted the largest volume of U.S. whole-of-society assistance (from government and non-governmental sources).
• Second, we explore Kenya’s performance on improving its democratic practices as part of its political and governance objectives. The United States has mobilized substantial financial and technical resources over the years to support competitive elections and diverse political representation to create positive incentives for public services to be delivered reliably and equitably for all of Kenya’s people.
• Third, we review Kenya’s performance in the agriculture sector, where a range of U.S. actors, including the government, are actively engaging and contributing through technical assistance, microloans, and grants.

Finding 13: U.S. health sector-focused assistance not only helps save lives, but also contributes to Kenya’s economic productivity, as people stay in the workforce longer.

A healthy, productive workforce is critical to achieving Kenya’s long-term vision of creating a globally competitive and prosperous nation by 2030. In this respect, the HIV/AIDS epidemic represents “one of the greatest threats to socio-economic development” (National Aids Control Council, 2020). As a case in point, Kenya saw a massive increase in new HIV infections in the late 1990s, becoming one of several African countries with high HIV prevalence.

Following a peak in AIDS-related deaths in 2004, Kenya has made steady improvements in curbing fatalities from the disease (see Figure 13), as well as reducing the number of new HIV infections by 55 percent since 2010 (UNAIDS, 2020). Kenya’s increasing ability to deliver prevention and treatment programs at scale—such as dramatically expanding coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for its affected populations (see Figure 13), as well as improving access to affordable healthcare for all—are important factors in this success story.

We estimate that efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in Kenya have been able to save just over a million lives to date. [28] Moreover, as Kenya’s average life expectancy has steadily increased over the past two decades—from 51 years in 2000 to 66 years in 2018 (see Figure 14)—this has corresponded to an increase of 15 years of economic productivity in each Kenyan’s life on average.

Kenya’s partnership with the United States has been vital in mobilizing the necessary resources and expertise to support front-line health workers in their efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since 2000, the U.S. government has increasingly directed substantial technical assistance and funding towards Kenya’s health sector (see Figure 3). A large portion of this contribution has gone toward combating HIV/AIDS in Kenya and making ART accessible. In fact, the U.S. government has been the largest contributor amongst all international donors to Kenya’s HIV/AIDS treatment and management efforts.

It is important to state that this assessment is not an evaluation of the effectiveness of particular development interventions, which is beyond the scope of this research, and that any number of factors may have contributed to Kenya’s declining HIV/AIDS-related deaths. That said, the fact that Kenya has experienced an increase in ART coverage that coincides with an increase in U.S. assistance in this area and a corresponding decline in fatalities suggests that the partnership with the United States is potentially generating value for the Kenyan people through improved quality of life and increased economic productivity.