Employment Is a Starting Point, Not the Whole Picture

What do we learn when someone is counted as employed?

We learn something important about economic participation. But we have not yet learned whether their household can meet its needs, whether they have enough paid work, or whether their job offers protection.

That distinction became concrete while I was building Beyond Employment, a data-analysis project using real public datasets from Kenya.

In the KNBS 2015/16 household survey, my analysis estimates that 29.7% of employed people aged 15–64 lived in households below the survey's overall consumption-poverty line.

That is a historical finding, using the survey's employment definition. It is household poverty, not a measure of an individual's wage, and it should not be presented as Kenya's current rate.

Before using the result, I reconstructed employment from the questionnaire and reproduced 26 published employment figures. I also checked that the consumption data reproduced the official national poverty estimates. Those checks mattered: a plausible number is not necessarily a defensible one.

A different survey offered a different perspective. In Afrobarometer Kenya 2024, 44.0% of respondents with full-time cash-income jobs reported that they or someone in their family had gone without enough food at least once in the previous year.

The timing matters. Their job status was current; the hardship question looked back over a year. We cannot assume the hardship occurred while they held that job. Nor can we treat lived deprivation and monetary poverty as interchangeable.

Still, both findings invite us to ask more of our measurement.

How many people work? How many have enough work? What resources does that work help their household command? What happens when income stops?

And beyond the boundary of employment statistics: how do we recognise care, study, volunteering and the work of sustaining a household?

These datasets cannot tell us whose life is useful. No employment category should carry that burden.

For me, the practical lesson is to keep the headline employment measure and place hours, protection and material conditions beside it. Each answers a different question. Together, they can describe livelihoods more honestly.

Beyond Employment is my attempt to make those distinctions visible, with the sources, definitions and limitations left open to inspection.

Sources: KNBS KIHBS 2015/16, https://statistics.knbs.or.ke/nada/index.php/catalog/13; Afrobarometer Data, Kenya, Round 10, 2024, https://www.afrobarometer.org/survey-resource/kenya-round-10-data-2024/. Percentages are my weighted calculations from those releases, not quotations of published subgroup findings.