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

Section 4.2 How do Kenyan leaders perceive U.S. contributions to Kenya’s development?

In the previous sections, we discussed how there is some evidence to suggest that Kenya is making progress on its development priorities on several fronts where the United States is contributing. However, we cannot say with certainty how these contributions are seen and perceived by public, private, and civil society leaders who are making and implementing development policies in Kenya. To obtain a better understanding, we conducted a short online survey of Kenyan leaders from a systematic sampling frame of government agencies, universities and think tanks, non-governmental and civil society organizations, development partners that are active in Kenya, and the private sector. The 138 survey respondents shared their views from their work across 14 sectors, including health, governance, and agriculture (see Figure 17). [32]

Finding 16: Kenyan leaders view the United States as an active partner in their country’s development and as having an attractive development model to emulate.

Ninety-five percent of the leaders surveyed reported the United States as being actively engaged in their areas of work in contributing to Kenya’s development. [33] Eighty-five percent of these respondents felt that the United States made a substantial contribution to helping Kenya achieve its development goals between 2010 and 2020. [34] The minority of leaders who reported that the United States contributed little or nothing to Kenya’s development most frequently cited insufficient funding, that funding came with too many restrictions, and that projects had been poorly implemented as the reasons for their perception.[35]

In Chapters 2 and 3, we showcased the diversity of U.S. actors that mobilize resources and broker relationships to benefit Kenya’s growth and prosperity. The survey results indicate that while Kenya’s leadership generally value the contribution that these diverse institutions and individuals bring to the table, the activities of these actors are not equally visible in practice.

The vast majority of Kenyan leaders surveyed cited U.S. government agencies and private philanthropic foundations as actively engaged in Kenya’s development (see Figure 18). Among those who identified the U.S. government as actively engaged in their sector, only a quarter of survey respondents underestimated the annual dollar value of those contributions relative to actual financial assistance amounts.

Comparatively, other U.S. actors were mentioned much less frequently. Strikingly, however, leaders were far more inclusive when it came to valuing the contributions that U.S. institutions and individuals made to Kenya’s growth and prosperity. For each of the categories of U.S. engagement in Kenya, over sixty percent of respondents identified these actors as making substantial contributions (see Figure 19).

Overall, U.S. government agencies, private foundations, and companies were valued most highly for their contributions to Kenya’s development progress; this is perhaps indicative of the scale of funding these actors are able to mobilize and may reveal a preference for capital over in-kind support.

Over a quarter of respondents to AidData’s 2020 Kenya Snap Poll valued not only these past contributions to Kenya’s development, but also identified the United States as having the best model of development to which their country should aspire (see Figure 20). Kenyan citizens are even more convinced of the merits of learning from America’s liberal democracy. Over 50 percent of respondents to the 2014 Afrobarometer, a nationally representative household survey, identified the U.S. model of development to be the best for Kenya to follow (see Figure 21).