Picture a woman in Kitui at the community well, filling a 20-litre jerrycan that has a crack near its base. The meter on the pump clicks to 20 litres and the water committee writes the figure in its book, but the water seeps out with every step of the walk home, and by the time she reaches her door, the jerrycan holds barely half.
The men who supply the village its cracked jerrycans and catch the drips along the path have no interest in mending anything, so when she complains, they tell her the fault lies in her pace, and that a woman who walked faster would bring home more water. Her children cook and wash with what is left, and the committee’s book shows a good month.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the meter reading at the well. It counts every shilling paid at the point of sale, the contract price, the electricity tariff, the boda boda fare, and books it as output without asking how much reached the households it was meant for, or who caught the drops on the way. On Wednesday the World Bank posted a better reading, raising Kenya’s growth forecast for this year to 4.6 per cent, while estimating in the same report that corruption and collusion widen fiscal deficits by about 2 per cent of GDP a year, which is the crack in our jerrycan. Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything attacks the habit of treating an activity’s market price as proof of its social value, which amounts to reading the meter without checking the jerrycan.
The first way to read past the meter is to ask whether ordinary earnings have risen with output. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics puts average annual earnings in formal employment at Sh988,200 in 2025, up from Sh933,100 in 2024, a real gain of only 2 percent once inflation is stripped out, and even that average hides private-sector workers gaining 3.9 per cent while public servants lost 2.2 per cent, before we count the millions outside formal employment whose incomes no payroll survey captures.
By October consumer prices were 7.3 per cent higher than a year earlier, with food up 10.2 per cent and transport up 17.1 per cent, so a household living on Sh30,000 a month and spending like the national basket needs Sh32,190 to stand still, and every shilling short of that is made up through smaller meals, emptied savings or a mobile loan.
The second is to ask what produces the growth. The World Bank’s 2023 Kenya Country Economic Memorandum found that two decades of growth had come mostly from adding more workers, machines and buildings, while the output each worker and each shilling of capital produced barely improved, and the government has yet to show that this year’s growth is any different. Corruption undermines productivity by steering contracts to the connected and paying better for access to power than for invention, so investment still produces growth at a higher price and with thinner returns. The update estimates that boda boda riders surrender between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of daily earnings to bribes, and the payment at the roadblock buys the passenger no faster journey and the rider no extra fare, leaving the officer’s share as extraction the national accounts never record as a cost.
On public investment, the Bank puts the Mombasa to Nairobi railway at about Sh988 million a kilometre against Sh741 million for Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam to Dodoma line, and attributes at least 30 per cent of a gap worth about Sh116 billion to governance failures. The trains run, which tells Kenyans nothing about whether they got fair value, or what the same money could have built.
Workers compelled to finance the affordable housing programme are owed the same scrutiny. An assessment by Grant Thornton for the Affordable Housing Board projected about Sh85.6 billion in contractor profits across 215 projects, at margins near 30 per cent. Profit rewards enterprise, so the question for those workers is whether the contracts were won in genuine competition and whether the returns reflect efficient delivery, real risk and decent homes, and they have been given too little disclosure to answer it.
Formalising the informal economy will not cure this, since informal production already sits inside GDP, and a rider who registers and files returns still meets the officer at the roadblock. Unless registration brings predictable rules, protection from harassment, and credit and services that help a business grow, the State has only made an overburdened worker easier to collect from, and telling him to register and pay more is the woman at the well being told to walk faster.
Kenya’s economy still pays best for proximity to power, turning politics into a contest over who takes more from an economy producing less than it could. Until a government can show what an ordinary wage buys, whether a business can expand without paying for permission and what each public shilling delivers, the growth rate remains a reading taken at the well, and as the 2027 campaign brings promises of faster growth, Kenyans should ask how much of it will still be in the jerrycan when it reaches their door.
