When the news media talk about how many people are living in poverty, how many people were killed in a war, or how many people have been affected by a famine, where do they get the numbers from? Quite often the numbers are based on a poorly informed guess, which may get magnified as it is passed on. According to the Daily Nation, the myth about how many people live in the Kibera slums has been exploded by the 2009 Kenyan Census figures.
According to popular estimates, the number of people living in Kibera in an area of less than 2.5 square kilometres was between 500,000 and 1 million, with some estimates as high as 2 million. Depending on which estimate you accepted, Kibera was the biggest or second-biggest slum in Africa, or even the biggest slum in the world. That reputation has now taken a beating, with the Census figures showing the number of residents as just 170,070.
It seems that half of all Kenyans do live in absolute poverty, but only a small proportion of them live in Nairobi’s slums, if the census figures are correct. The total number living in slums according to the census is 618,916, out of a total population in the country of 38,610,097. Based on these figures, community development efforts have been over-servicing Kibera at the expense of the rest of the country.