Rising life expectancy brings mixed blessings, indicate statistics

Kenya’s campaigns to attain the desired population and health status are turning in successes and challenges, going by the statistics from an international think tank.

The US-based Population Reference Bureau’s latest report provides a glimmer of hope that the country is making strides in raising the life expectancy of its citizens, controlling population growth and reducing the number of children and mothers who die during or after birth.

Kenya’s life expectancy, a crucial measure of the length of life that children born today can live based on current death rates, has shot up. This is a pointer that the quality of life in the country is improving, perhaps helped by development programmes such as stipends for older people and the distribution of wealth through the Constituency Development Fund.

According to the bureau’s World Population Data Sheet 2014, the average life expectancy for Kenyan men and women stood at 62 years last year, the highest in the three East African countries. The life expectancy has been recording an improvement from the average of 55 years in 2009.

Poverty alleviation

The latest statistics from the organisation that deals with issues related to population, health and the environment show that Kenya has beaten Tanzania (61), which previously scored better in the population indicator, while Uganda’s life expectancy stood at 59 years.

The Kenyan average is, however, nine years less than the world average – 71 years. It means the country’s people have a shorter life span than those of most other nations.

According to the report, women in Kenya continue to live longer than their male counterparts, 64 years compared to 60.

Population experts have often predicted the rise in life expectancy following sustained government spending on poverty alleviation programmes, improved health services and successes in treatment of people living with HIV/Aids.

The document also shows that the number of people in Kenya aged 15 or less is nearly double the world average. According to the Data Sheet, 42 per cent of Kenyans are children less than 15 years old. This is a much larger fraction than the global 26 per cent.

Paradoxically, the document shows, the country has a much smaller number of people aged 65 and above.

According to the report, only three per cent of the estimated 43 million people are aged 65 and above, compared to the world average of eight per cent. The world population is estimated at 7.2 billion.

Usually, the people aged below 15 and above 65 are considered not to be productive in the labour force, meaning they have to depend on the working class for food, shelter, healthcare and other needs.

This, therefore, means that Kenya still has a high number of dependants.

Population experts have previously warned of another crisis arising from a rapidly rising number of older people in the country and called for programmes that can deal with the problem, including the increase of the monthly stipend of about Sh2,000.

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

The number of people above the age of 65 was 1.7 million in 1999, but it had increased by a million by the time the 2009 population and housing census was conducted.

It now stands at about 2.6 million, representing an annual growth rate of about four per cent. The figure has defied earlier estimates of the number hitting 2.2 million in 2020.

“This is cause for worry,” Cecilia Kimemia, the UN Population Fund assistant representative at the Kenya country office, said recently. “We need an urgent policy to help us tackle the impending crisis.”

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

Health services

“We need to make the programme universal,” said Erastus Maina, an official of  HelpAge Kenya.

Overall, Kenya’s population is bottom heavy, with more than half of the 40-plus million people being young people below 20 years of age.

This has put pressure on the delivery of public services, as witnessed in the low access rates to education and health services.

According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics’ Well-Being in Kenya: A Social Economic Profile report, the country’s dependence ratio stands at 80.1 This means that there are 81 people depending on every 100 working-age people.

The 2014  Data Sheet also shows that the total fertility rate, the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime, stands at 4.3.

By the time the latest Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) was conducted, in 2008-2009, the total fertility rate was 4.6 per cent.

Although the country is making good progress, the trend is still far above the world average of 2.5.

The revelation implies that the government, and by extension counties, need to put more effort in coming up with measures to reduce fertility to the desired levels, including the use of contraceptives.

Going by the statistics contained in the global report, the level of contraceptive use in the country among married women is still low, at 46 per cent, meaning most do not use any method of preventing pregnancies. Worldwide, the average is 63 per cent.

Further, the number of those using modern methods of contraception reduces further to 39 per cent, against a world average of 56 per cent, according to the data sheet.

The high birth rate among Kenyan women and low levels of contraceptive use are the main causes of the robust population growth.

According to government reports, including the KDHS, up to 25 per cent of men and women would like to use contraceptives but have no access to them.

The country is hoping at achieving contraceptive prevalence rates of 56 per cent among married women.

The aim of the Government is to control the current population growth rate of 2.9 per cent per annum. This translates to one million people added to the population annually.

The country’s population, which stood at 15.3 million in 1979, stood at 38.6 million by the time the 2009 census was conducted.

Kenya’s population was 8.6 million in 1962, a year before the country gained independence.

The National Council for Population and Development projections indicate that the population will hit 64 million in 2030 if the growth rate remains constant.