Measuring development in the 'district focus for rural development' in Kenya: the case of Murang'a district.

Abstract

The study has been devoted to the problems of measuring/ evaluating development for a rural district in Kenya as an aid to planning. It has been conceived that one of the problems Kenya would face in the efficient implementation of the 'District Focus for Rural Development' Strategy would be to measure development in the district. Paucity of conventional data based on classical and neoclassical economic theory would lead to difficulty in the computation of aggregates for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Regional growth in advanced economies is linked to more easily measurable economic aggregates like income, savings, investment, capital, consumption, production, labor and volume of trade. On the contrary, regional economic development, taken to refer more to Less Developed Countries (LDC s), has been associated with non-quantitative measures of a growing economy to also involving social changes and attitudes. Development in LDC s becomes a multi-dimensional process involving major changes in social structure, popular attitudes, all development institutions, as well as acceleration of economic growth and satisfaction of basic needs for large numbers of rural households. The gap this study hopes to bridge is the need to define 'development' in quantitative terms for exercises like planning, against the paradox of development's non-quantitative nature and especially with the background of traditional societies in small rural districts.Various aspects of development in the study area of Murang'a District were examined for all the twenty nine 'locations'. The emphasis primarily was to identify district-specific data that could be used in evaluating its development. Data was collected through questionnaires and interviews with all the Chiefs, interviews with government ministry representatives in the district and physical inspection of selected leading small towns and trading centers. The entire battery of collected data was screened to isolate 50 variables that could be assigned to the five 'divisions' of the study district. A multivariate analysis of the 50 variables and derivation of a composite index of value for comparing development in the divisions of the district lent empirical support to the study phenomena. The main findings of the study supported the view that physical and.structural variables, used together with economic and social indicators, would form a satisfactory basis for evaluating development in small sub-national areas of a developing country given situations of acute conventional data deficiency. Construction of a Comp~site Spatial Development Value Index (CSDVI) solves the problem.