Despite Kenya’s strong economic growth, expansion of employment in the formal sector has been slow over the last two decades. There has been limited structural change in the composition of recorded employment and the share of the informal sector remained at nearly 83 per cent of total employment in the last two decades. Further, although the country has implemented various policy interventions to address youth employment, the interventions have not resulted into adequate job creation in various sectors for the youth. This policy brief provides an evaluation of the sectors with high potential of creating employment opportunities for the youths in Kenya using an Input – Output approach which was based on the 2015 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM).

Growth Sectors for Youth Employment (GSYE) is an African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) collaborative research that is seeking to provide research evidence on which economic sectors have the potential to significantly create employment for youth. The project was commissioned by INCLUDE, with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project is implemented by AERC in conjunction with the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). The project aims to provide research evidence on the economic sectors with the highest multipliers and potential to create employment opportunities for young people in the continent.

This policy brief presents the country case study of Kenya, one of the nine countries selected for country-specific research.

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