Kenya's current Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) perceives poverty as
inadequacy of incomes and deprivation of basic needs and rights, and lack of access to
productive assets as well as social infrastructure and markets (Republic of Kenya 2001).
In money terms, absolute poverty in Kenya is pegged at Kshs. 1,239 per person per
month in the rural areas and Kshs. 2,648 per person per month for the urban areas of the
country (Republic of Kenya 1997). The 1994 Welfare Monitoring Survey (WMS)
therefore categorises the poor in Kenya to include people with large families, those
engaged in subsistence farming, and those lacking a source of income (WMS 1994).
Nevertheless, people in general and the poor in particular define and experience poverty
in diverse ways. In the PRSP workshops, most respondents associated poverty with
deprivations including lack of land, unemployment, inability to feed oneself and family,
lack of proper housing, poor health and inability to educate children and pay medical bills
(Republic of Kenya 2001).
With the emergence of panel data sets in recent years, the attention to the nuances of
poverty has increased among researchers. In particular, there is increased concern about
the possible differences between the chronically poor and the transient poor and the
implications for poverty reduction strategies (e.g. Hulme et al. 2001). One of the key
hypothesized differences is that chronic poverty may be related to certain structural
factors of households (or communities) requiring a different set of interventions than for
addressing the needs of the transient poor.