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Funding for cash to the elderly to rise by Sh15bn in three years
The elderly and vulnerable persons wait to open bank accounts for the Inua Jamii program at the Elburgon Assistant County Commissioner's office ground in Nakuru County on May 24, 2024.
The government’s budget for cash transfer to elderly citizens is projected to rise by Sh15 billion over the three years to June 2027, as the State lines up a major recruitment exercise that will see the number of beneficiaries rise to about 1.9 million.
Official government projections show that the cash transfer programme for elderly citizens –which supports poor old people with monthly cash transfers of Sh2,000— plans to register an additional 638,386 elderly Kenyans to benefit from the support, between the current fiscal year and June 2027.
During the year ending June 2024, the government supported 1,251,720 elderly Kenyans with the monthly cash transfers and this number is expected to grow to 1,890,106 Kenyans by June 2027, projections by the state department for social protection and senior citizen affairs show.
This would see the annual budget for the government on cash support for elderly Kenyans, shoot from Sh30 billion during the 2023/24 fiscal year, to Sh45 billion in the year to June 2027.
Over the three years to June 2024, the number of beneficiaries of the cash transfer for elderly persons grew by 65 percent to 1,251,720.
“The increase in older persons cash transfer in the period under review, was attributed to the Presidential directive on scaling up of beneficiaries by 500,000,” the state department for social protection and senior citizen affairs notes.
The projected growth in number of beneficiaries over the three years to June 2027 is 51 percent and during the period older women receiving the government’s cash support, are expected to cross a million in number.
This means that the government plans to intensify the exercise to register more poor, elderly Kenyans in need of socioeconomic support, while cleaning up and updating data on the current register.
Women will constitute 61 percent of the 1,890,106 beneficiaries of the cash transfer to the elderly in the year to June 2027, making up 1.15 million of the elderly cash transfer beneficiaries.
Between 2021/22 and 2023/24, the government grew the number of elderly cash transfer beneficiaries from 756,935 to 1,251,720.
Women have constituted a similar proportion of beneficiaries of the programme over the past three years but will increase by 389,416 in terms of newly registered beneficiaries, against 248,970 additional male beneficiaries to be registered over the three years to June 2027.
