| dc.description.abstract | This is a country study. Our concern is with regional
disparities in economic development of Kenya. The study
attempts to delineate the trends of regional inequalities
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among Kenya's eight regions. This is done by examining the
available data since independence. Hence, the study covers a
twenty year period (1963-1983). Five variables have been
chosen for this analysis. These are land, agriculture,
urbanization, industrial production and social services i.e.
education and health.
Chapter I is introductory in that it prasents a general
geographical overview of Kenya. This includes a discussion
of the physical features such as climate, vegetation and
topography, and how the latter three have influenced the
country's demographic distributions.
Chapter II analyses the regions of Kenya i.e. how they
were formed, the people inhabiting them, their distribution
and densities. The chapter also examines the types of land
available in terms of its quality classification and how such
lands are distributed regionally.
Land distribution on the basis of tenure is discussed
in Chapter III. Three systems of tenure are examined. These
* The terms "regions" and Provinces are used inter-
-changeably throughout the study.
are government lands, freehold lands and trust lands. Our
purpose here, is mainly to try to show how these three
categories came to evolve and the economic impact these
systems of tenure may have had on the lives of the Kenyan
people. Chapter III also discusses the process of land
reforms in Kenya. This is done at two levels, namely, land
registration and land settlement· schemes.
In Chapter IV, we extend our discusoion of land to
include land utilization as a prelude to the pattern of agriculture
in Kenya. This is done sequentially by first
analysing small farm production. Then, we move to discuss
large-farm production before combining small and large-farms
together. Thereafter, we juxtapose livestock production on
the latter t\O in order to present a general pattern of the
agricultural sector as a whole.
Urbanization is discussed in Chapter V. Our approach
in this section is basically normative. We have avoided
indulging in unnecessary polemics about the development of
urban primacy and instead have only given the data to show
that urbanization is accelerating rapidly in Kenya. But by
doing so, the idea has been to show the dwindling nature of
traditional societies as a result of demographic adjustments
caused by rural-urban population drift.
The industrial sector is discussed in Chapter VI where
we examine the development policies from the first to the
fourth plans. Our aim in this chapter is basically to reveal | en |
