Overview of The USAID/Kenya Strategy

(Fy 2001 To 2005)

For this five-year period, USAID has adopted a strategy focused on both the immediate and long-term needs of Kenya, one of USAID’s oldest development partners in Africa.  USAID continues to provide support to a wide range of players in the political arena who are pressing for fundamental changes to key institutions and electoral processes.  But a balanced development strategy requires that democratic changes be accompanied by improvements in the health and wealth of a nation’s people.  That is the focus of the long-term strategy involving sustaining family planning and HIV/AIDS service deliver systems, projects to help small farmers improve their productivity and income, and projects to protect the nation’s natural resource base.

The strategic plan was the project of intensive consultation and collaboration between USAID/Kenya and a wide range of Kenyans – rural and urban, men and women of all ages, households and individuals, farmers and formal sector employees. Working towards the long-term goal of a democratic and economically prosperous Kenya, strategic objectives emerged during the consultative process in the areas of democracy and governance, economic development, population and health, and natural resource management.

This page outlines the broad strokes of USAID’s plan for the five-year period.  The strategic objectives build on past successes in the critical areas of family planning, small-holder agriculture, micro enterprise development, natural resources management, and reducing the risk of HIV/AIDS transmission.  But the new strategy also expands the program in significant new directions.  The democracy and governance program, for example, continues to strengthen civil society, but it will also focus on increasing the independence and effectiveness of key institutions of governance.  The agriculture program has been broadened to emphasize the empowerment of membership-based organizations that will truly represent the interests of farmers.  A new objective in natural resource management focuses on helping communities living adjacent to Kenya’s national parks and conservation areas share responsibility for conserving the country’s valuable biodiversity.  And this program commits increasing resources to the fight against AIDS, which threatens Kenya in many ways.

USAID’s program is built on partnerships with Kenya’s vibrant private and nongovernmental sector and emphasizes participation, initiative, and empowerment.

USAID Kenya goal and Strategic Objectives

The overarching goal of the USAID/Kenya program is to promote a well-governed and more prosperous Kenya. This goal is supported by four strategic objectives, described briefly on each SO web page.
 
Strategic Objective 3 promotes prosperity in three senses. First, a population ravaged by HIV/AIDS is not prosperous, no matter what income levels are. The progress of this killer disease must be stopped. Second, economic progress is severely retarded by the costs of HIV/AIDS across all sectors of the economy. Third, population growth must be slowed further if unemployment is to be decreased and per-capita income is to be rapidly increased.

Strategic Objective 5 contributes to achievement of the USAID/Kenya goal, although it may not be necessary to its achievement. Improved NRM will improve the prosperity of communities that increase their stewardship of Kenya’s natural resource base, and will help revive Kenya’s tourism industry, a major source of foreign exchange. Moreover, pursuit of this strategic objective supports USAID’s agency-level goal of protecting the world’s environment.

Strategic Objective 6 directly supports this goal by promoting both public demand for good governance and the independence and effectiveness of government institutions that can increase accountability of government to the public.

Strategic Objective 7 supports the goal by promoting economic growth and focusing on households in rural areas, where the great majority of Kenya’s poor reside. By anyone’s measure, prosperity will elude Kenya until many more Kenyans see their incomes rise well above the poverty line.