Looking at Kenya’s GDP, the African country has the highest gross domestic product per capita in the East African Community and still only reaches a value that is less than 2 per cent of the GDP of my home country Germany

Looking at Kenya’s GDP, the African country has the highest gross domestic product per capita in the East African Community and still only reaches a value that is less than 2 per cent of the GDP of my home country Germany

The allocation of poverty shows a heterogeneous geographical distribution of poverty. Especially the North and some Counties close to the coast seem to struggle, whereas the counties south of the equator are much wealthier.

The allocation of poverty shows a heterogeneous geographical distribution of poverty. Especially the North and some Counties close to the coast seem to struggle, whereas the counties south of the equator are much wealthier.

I wanted to learn more about the well-heeled and the poor in Kenya. The platform OpenData Kenya offers detailed statistics that also include information on poverty. The Database County Data Sheet Indicators 2009 provides various indicators that are related more or less to wealth and poverty. I decided to join that database to a county Shapefile to examine the distribution of wealth by looking at each county's poverty rate. According to that database, the poverty line is defined by 1562 KSH (~18$) in rural areas and 2913 KSH (~33.5$) in urban areas per month.

For sure, there are numerous effects that cause that distribution. For example, Kenya’s north is close to the current “lost countries” South Sudan and Somalia and also Ethiopia is struggling economically. The region is thus challenged by frequent security issues and less profitable for investors and entrepreneurship.

But there is one factor that I wanted to highlight in this project. Due to my work around Kisumu, I talk a lot to people that are involved in horticultural businesses through their family owned farms for income generation. This business is strongly bound to rain and it is obvious, that the availability of water is thus important to avoid poverty. To tackle the question, whether there is really a relation between rain/precipitation you could easily do some statistic tests like calculating the correlation and creating a scatter plot.



