Child Vulnerability and Social Protection in Kenya

This report highlights evidence that targeting social protection at orphans, 7.5% of Kenya’s children, with a Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children inadvertently leads to the exclusion of other children who are equally or even more vulnerable. It also underlines that more than seven out of ten households in rural Kenya experience poverty over a ten-year period, and that an experience of poverty in the first years of a child’s life can have “negative and irreversible effects that last through adulthood”.

The report puts forward a number of proposals for building a more inclusive and child-sensitive lifecycle national social protection system, in line with the vision outlined in Kenya’s National Social Protection Strategy (2011) and the right to social security for all citizens enshrined in the national Constitution. Ultimately, the key policy choice is whether to continue to target the CT-OVC programme to a group of (older) children who are not necessarily more vulnerable than other children, or to continue to transition towards an inclusive lifecycle social security system by implementing a more conventional child benefit.