Why Government Officials Will Be Visiting Kenyan Homes Starting This Week
The Kenyan government, through the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), has officially begun a countrywide door-to-door data collection exercise aimed at gathering important information to help with national planning and policymaking.
This major operation, known as the 2025/26 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey (KIHBS), kicked off on July 16, 2025, and is expected to run for a full year, covering all 47 counties in Kenya.
According to KNBS, this survey plays a crucial role in collecting detailed and accurate data that will help guide the country’s development strategies.
It aims to assess key aspects such as living standards, income distribution, levels of poverty, and social well-being across different regions. The information collected will be used to create better policies and plans that directly address the needs of Kenyans.
The KIHBS will cover a wide range of areas including population characteristics (demographics), education, healthcare access, employment patterns, fertility and mortality rates, nutrition levels among children, housing conditions, and household consumption habits.
It will also gather important data on access to clean water, proper sanitation, and the use of different energy sources, helping the government paint a clearer picture of the quality of life in urban and rural areas alike.
To carry out this survey, KNBS has deployed trained enumerators who will visit selected households for face-to-face interviews. These officers will be easily recognizable – they’ll carry tablet computers, wear official identification badges with QR codes, and present introduction letters from KNBS to prove their authenticity.
The survey will target 24,480 households that have been scientifically selected to ensure a representative sample from across the country. In addition, 960 households located in refugee camps will also be included, ensuring that the data collected reflects the diversity and realities of all communities living in Kenya.
KNBS has emphasized that all information gathered will be kept strictly confidential and will only be used for statistical and research purposes. They are urging households that are selected to fully cooperate with the enumerators and provide the needed details truthfully.
This cooperation is essential for the success of the survey and will help the government make informed decisions that benefit citizens at all levels.
In a recent public statement, KNBS stressed the importance of this exercise, noting that the results will influence how the government allocates funds, develops national budgets, and implements development programs in the future.
This comes as KNBS continues to release findings from earlier surveys. In one of its recent reports released on May 6, KNBS highlighted a growing trend in Kenya’s employment landscape. The report revealed that more Kenyans are now creating their own jobs or working in the informal sector rather than being employed in formal jobs.
In 2024, Kenya’s economy generated 782,300 new jobs, most of which were created in the private sector.
However, this number represented a 7.8 per cent decline compared to the jobs created in 2023. Out of the total jobs in 2024, about 90 per cent were in the informal sector, which includes small businesses, casual laborers, and self-employed individuals.
This sector grew by 4.2 per cent, reaching a total of 17.4 million workers, although this growth rate was slower than in previous years.
On the other hand, the formal sector – which includes regular jobs that pay monthly wages – contributed only 78,600 new positions.
Wage employment in this sector increased by 2.4 per cent, bringing the total number of formal workers to around 3.2 million. Additionally, there was a slight increase in the number of self-employed individuals and unpaid family workers within the formal sector.
As Kenya continues to collect and analyze this kind of data, it becomes clearer how valuable accurate, up-to-date statistics are in shaping the country’s future.
The KIHBS survey is therefore a major step towards ensuring that development plans are based on real, reliable information about the lives of everyday Kenyans.
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