UN, foreign NGO employees cement best paid positions

The sanitation sector workers were joined on the low earners list by Kenyans producing goods and services from their households at Sh29,443, and real estate activity at Sh30,416, new data published by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) on Tuesday shows.

They were out earned by a factor of 12 times by employees in the well-funded multilateral agencies and NGOs, which include the likes of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), which paid their workers an average of Sh353,048 per month—representing pay increase of 4.1 percent from 2023.

The multilateral organisations’ fat perks allow them to attract top talent from around the world, some of whom are hired on wages and other benefits based on pay standards in their wealthier home countries.

The next best paid were those working in the electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply sector at Sh205,270, and financial services at Sh198,084 per month, which also require specialist skills, hence the attractive pay terms.

These three sectors have held the top three positions in private sector pay since 2014, with the energy segment overtaking financial services in average pay for the first time in 2022.

In the public sector, the top paying jobs were in the accommodation and food services (Sh249,864), transportation and storage (Sh217,737) and financial services sectors at Sh190,653.

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Workers in the public health sector, who include doctors and nurses, took home an average of Sh153,478 per month, out earning their colleagues in the private health sector who took home an average of Sh107,766 per month.

The lowest paying jobs for the public sector were found in agriculture, forestry and fishing at Sh47,795 per month, followed by mining and quarrying at Sh48,686 and public administration, defence and compulsory social security at Sh57,204 per month.

Although characterised by low average wages, the agriculture sector remained Kenya’s second biggest source of jobs with 351,000 wage employees in both the public and private sectors last year, behind manufacturing at 369,200 workers.

Kenya’s economy relies on farming activities, which contribute 22.5 percent of its total economic output per year.

Overall, Kenya’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 4.7 percent last year, compared to a revised growth of 5.7 percent in 2023. It created a total of 782,300 new jobs last year, down from 848,100 in 2023.

This was also the lowest pace of jobs growth since 2020, when thousands of workers were laid off due to economic challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The informal sector accounted for 90 percent or 703,700 of the new jobs created last year, exposing the continued challenges facing the formal sector in the post-Covid period.

The findings also exposed the wider gap between the top and bottom pay tiers of the private sector compared to the public sector.

On average, the pay gap between an employee in an aid agency and one in the water and waste management sector in the private sector stood at Sh323,933 per month, while in the public sector, the gap between the top earners in the accommodation sector and the bottom earners in the agriculture sector was Sh202,069 per month.

The average wage in the private sector stood at Sh80,548 per month, representing an increase of 5.4 percent from the 2023 average of Sh76,660. This means that top earners in the sector were taking home between 2.6 and 4.4 times the average private sector wage per month.

In the public sector, the average monthly wage stood at Sh71,782, meaning that the top three earning segments outperformed the average by between 2.7 and 3.5 times.

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