This archive report was first published on 13 November 2019.
As the world converges on Nairobi for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) dubbed the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25, Kenya is reminded of the need to consolidate gains and accelerate progress in population and development. This is 25 years after the Cairo ICPD in 1994.
November 13, 2019
Kenya, like many African countries, will need to embark on a major evidence generation, synthesis, and use agenda to meet the ideals of ICPD25 and beyond. While creditable progress has been made globally and in Kenya in areas of the ICPD Programme of Action, including access to reproductive and sexual health and family planning services, reducing maternal, infant, and child mortality, and universal education, many challenges remain to reach the SDG targets.
The country's rapidly growing youthful population, alongside significant increases in the number of old people, poses challenges to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Environmental degradation and climate change are threatening food security, while rapid urbanisation, poorly executed urban planning, and rural to urban migration are eroding the quality of life of urban dwellers.
Policy decisions and investments in these areas are being made in the absence of adequate data, both at the national level and in our counties. This is where the problem of evidence gaps is even more acute.
Let's take the example of the state's often-stated priority: young people. It's estimated that about 76 percent of Kenya's 48 million people are under the age of 35. The government has invested billions in programmes to support the youth, but we hardly interrogate how the lack of evidence leads to these failures.
Did we have adequate data to correctly identify and contextualise the youth problems we were trying to solve? Did we conduct and evaluate pilot programmes to understand what works or not and only scale up what worked? Do we know enough about our millions of out-of-school youth to tailor effective programmes for them?
It's time for the country to commit itself to a revolutionary evidence agenda, as advocated by the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25.
