Beneficiaries of Inua Jamii, the government's social protection programme, risk missing out on cash transfers from March to June 2025 if the National Treasury fails to include Sh16.958 billion in the Supplementary Budget II.
According to the National Assembly's Labour and Social Protection Committee, the elderly, orphans, vulnerable children and people with severe disabilities are among the vulnerable groups that will be affected after 500,000 new beneficiaries were recruited without an increase in the budget.
The committee said the State Department for Social Protection and Senior Citizens Affairs informed it that the huge funding gap was caused by President William Ruto's directive to scale up the Inua Jamii programme.
“Following the presidential directive to upscale the Inua Jamii Programme, approximately 500,000 beneficiaries have been enrolled from June 2024, and thus the total number of beneficiaries has increased to 1.76 million beneficiaries,” committee chairperson Alice Ng’ang’a said in a report on the scrutiny of the Supplementary Estimates II for 2024/24 financial year.
“This leaves a funding gap of Sh16.958 billion in the remaining four months of the financial year and the coming financial year. If this funding gap is not addressed through this Second Supplementary Estimates, the elderly persons, orphans, vulnerable children and persons with severe disabilities under Inua Jamii will not receive any cash transfers from March to June 2025.”
The Inua Jamii programme supports poor elderly people with monthly cash transfers of Sh2,000. The programme also has a component that supports orphans, vulnerable children and people with severe disabilities.
“The committee recommends intervention by the National Executive on the matter,” Ms Ng’ang’a said in a report submitted to the Liaison Committee that is scrutining the Supplementary Budget II.
Joseph Motari, the Principal Secretary for Social Protection and Senior Citizens Affairs, told the committee on March 6, 2025, that it had already spent Sh25.6 billion out of its total budget of Sh36.41 billion by the end of December 2024.
“This translates to an absorption level of 70.31 percent. The high absorption level was due to full-year access under the Development Budget of the Kenya Social Economic Inclusion Programme (KSEIP I) that was ending in December 2024 as well as 3rd Quarter access of the Inua Jamii Programme under the Recurrent Budget,” Mr Motari told MPs.
President Ruto in 2023 directed Cabinet Secretary for Labour and Social Protection, Florence Bore, to add 500,000 beneficiaries under the Inua Jamii Programmes.
Dr Ruto said at the time that his administration would expand the social protection kitty to cushion beneficiaries from poverty and vulnerability, and improve their livelihoods.
The government’s budget for cash transfer for elderly citizens is projected to increase by Sh15 billion over the three years to June 2027, as the State lines up a major recruitment exercise that will see the number of beneficiaries rise to about 1.9 million.
Official government projections show that the cash transfer programme will rise with the registration of an additional 638,386 elderly Kenyans to benefit from the support between the current fiscal year and June 2027.
In the year to June 2024, the government supported 1,251,720 elderly Kenyans with monthly stipends, and this number is expected to grow to 1,890,106 by June 2027, projections by the state department for social protection and senior citizen affairs show.
This would increase the government's annual budget for cash transfers to older Kenyans from Sh30 billion in the 2023/24 financial year to Sh45 billion in the year to June 2027.
In the three years to June 2024, the number of beneficiaries of the cash transfer for the elderly increased by 65 percent to 1,251,720.
Between 2021/22 and 2023/24, the government increased the number of elderly cash transfer beneficiaries from 756,935 to 1,251,720.
