- 2024 Economic Survey says employment in the modern and informal sectors, excluding small-scale farming and pastoralist activities, went up from 19.1 million in 2022 to 20 million in 2023.
- The nominal wage bill rose by 7.3 per cent to Sh2.8.6 trillion in 2023.
- According to the 2024 Economic Survey, Real annual average earnings per employee in the private sector declined by 2.5 per cent
At least 848,200 new jobs were generated in Kenya last year despite a tough economy that saw firms resort to retrenchment to cut operating costs. The Kenya Economic Survey 2024 released today by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows the informal sector contributed the majority of the jobs at 720,900 or 85 per cent.
Employment in the modern and informal sectors, excluding small-scale farming and pastoralist activities, went up from 19.1 million in 2022 to 20 million in 2023.
In the year under review, wage employment in the modern sector grew by 4.1 per cent, translating to 122,800 new jobs in the sector. Public sector wage employment registered a growth of 5.9 per cent in 2023 compared to 1.6 per cent recorded in 2022. The nominal wage bill rose by 7.3 per cent to Sh2.8.6 trillion in 2023.
The private sector wage on other hand went up by 8.2 per cent to Sh1.96 trillion, while the public sector wage bill increased by 5.3 per cent and accounted for 29.8 per cent of the total wage payments in the period under review.
Teachers in the country took the biggest pie of the public sector wage bill at Sh285 billion, a 6.5 per cent rise compared to the same period last year. This accounted for 34.2 per cent of the total public sector wage bill in 2023.
In the year under review, overall annual average earnings increased by 3.4 per cent to Sh894,232.8 compared to Sh864,750.1 in 2022.
Annual average earnings in the private sector increased by 5.4 per cent to Sh920,000, while those in the public sector decreased by 0.5 per cent to Sh838,000.
Overall, real annual average earnings per employee decreased by 4.1 per cent to Sh667,300, translating to Sh55,608 per month.
Real annual average earnings per employee in the private sector declined by 2.5 per cent to Sh686,400 or Sh57,200 per month, while those in the public sector declined by 7.8 per cent to Sh625,900 (Sh52,158 per month) over the same period.
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What Impacted Salary on 2024 Economic Survey
Although the report is mute on what contributed to a decline in salaries, experts are pointing it to a high tax regime, especially the introduction of a housing levy of 2.5 per cent of gross salary and an increase in social protection and national health cover charges. Even so, the average annual inflation rate as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) maintained at 7.7 per cent in 2023 as was recorded in 2022.
The inflation was largely driven by an increase in prices of Transport (12.2 per cent); food and non-alcoholic beverages (9.7 per cent); and housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels (8.1 per cent).
However Kenyans are yet to feel the impact of the opportunities as the rate of unemployment among women in Kenya is twice that of men, revealing that the campaigns aimed at reducing the gender gap in access to opportunities were yet to bear fruits.
An analysis of the 2023 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows that the percentage of women who had not been employed in the 12 months before the survey stood at 40.3 percent against 18.5 percent for men.
More than half of Kenyans without jobs, or 1.54 million people, were between 20 and 29 years old, underlining the growing crisis of youth unemployment.
According to official data the long-term unemployment rate for women is significantly higher, reaching 63.6 percent for those without formal education, in contrast to the 18.7 percent reported for men in a similar educational bracket.
However, women with educational backgrounds beyond secondary school still face a higher unemployment rate, standing at 25.8 percent, in contrast to men with equivalent education levels experiencing a 11.7 percent unemployment rate.
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