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Opinion: the Kibera population figure that will not die.
Opinion & Voices. The views here are the writer's own.
Search for Kibera and you will be told, within two clicks, that it is the largest slum in Africa and that around one million people live there. Both statements have been reproduced by broadcasters, charities, textbooks and, for years, by parts of the Kenyan press.
Kenya's census does not support either.
What the counts actually found
When the 2009 census results were published, the figure returned for Kibera came in dramatically below the numbers that had been circulating, in the low hundreds of thousands rather than anywhere near a million. The finding was disputed at the time, loudly. Independent enumeration exercises run by researchers and by organisations working in the settlement have since arrived at figures broadly consistent with the census rather than with the popular claim.
We are deliberately not printing a single headline number here, because the right one depends on the boundary you draw and the year you use. What can be said with confidence is that no official count has produced anything close to a million.
Subsequent census rounds have not produced anything resembling a million either. Kibera is large. It is dense. On the available evidence it is not the largest informal settlement in Africa, and it is not home to a million people.
Why the big number persists
Partly inertia. A figure repeated for twenty years acquires the authority of a fact, and every new article cites the last one.
Partly incentive. A larger number makes a stronger funding proposal, a more arresting headline and a more significant constituency. Nobody involved in repeating it is necessarily acting in bad faith; it is simply that no actor in the chain has an interest in the smaller figure.
And partly because it is hard to count people in a settlement where structures are subdivided, households are fluid, many people are seasonal migrants and there is deep and rational suspicion of anyone arriving with a clipboard. Enumeration here is genuinely difficult, and difficulty leaves room for whatever number people want.
Why it matters
It matters because resources are allocated per head. Health facility staffing, school capitation, water allocation, waste collection contracts and ward development funds are all sized against population. A settlement that is systematically over-counted in the popular imagination and correctly counted in the official one gets the official allocation and the popular resentment.
It matters because it distorts every rate. Divide a real number of clinics by an imaginary population and you get a crisis. Divide it by the real one and you get a different, more accurate and still serious picture. Bad denominators produce bad policy.
It matters because credibility is cumulative. When residents point out that the headline number is wrong and are ignored, they reasonably conclude that the rest of the coverage is no more careful.
And it matters because the exaggeration does not actually help. Kibera's real conditions are difficult enough to make the case unaided. You do not need to quadruple the population to justify a sewer.
What we would ask
Of colleagues in the media: cite the census, note the range of credible estimates, and stop repeating one million. If you must use a range, say so.
Of organisations fundraising on Kibera: your work does not need the inflated figure and your donors deserve the real one.
Of government: publish ward-level census and service data in a form residents can actually use. The reason bad numbers circulate is that good ones are hard to find. At the time of writing the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics website was returning gateway errors, which rather makes the point.
KNN's own style from here is to use census-derived figures, to state the year, and to note where estimates differ. If we get it wrong, tell us.
That was a Kibra News Network report, read by an A I voice.
Opinion & Voices. The views here are the writer’s own.
Search for Kibera and you will be told, within two clicks, that it is the largest slum in Africa and that around one million people live there. Both statements have been reproduced by broadcasters, charities, textbooks and, for years, by parts of the Kenyan press.
Kenya’s census does not support either.
What the counts actually found
When the 2009 census results were published, the figure returned for Kibera came in dramatically below the numbers that had been circulating, in the low hundreds of thousands rather than anywhere near a million. The finding was disputed at the time, loudly. Independent enumeration exercises run by researchers and by organisations working in the settlement have since arrived at figures broadly consistent with the census rather than with the popular claim.
We are deliberately not printing a single headline number here, because the right one depends on the boundary you draw and the year you use. What can be said with confidence is that no official count has produced anything close to a million.
Subsequent census rounds have not produced anything resembling a million either. Kibera is large. It is dense. On the available evidence it is not the largest informal settlement in Africa, and it is not home to a million people.
Why the big number persists
Partly inertia. A figure repeated for twenty years acquires the authority of a fact, and every new article cites the last one.
Partly incentive. A larger number makes a stronger funding proposal, a more arresting headline and a more significant constituency. Nobody involved in repeating it is necessarily acting in bad faith; it is simply that no actor in the chain has an interest in the smaller figure.
And partly because it is hard to count people in a settlement where structures are subdivided, households are fluid, many people are seasonal migrants and there is deep and rational suspicion of anyone arriving with a clipboard. Enumeration here is genuinely difficult, and difficulty leaves room for whatever number people want.
Why it matters
It matters because resources are allocated per head. Health facility staffing, school capitation, water allocation, waste collection contracts and ward development funds are all sized against population. A settlement that is systematically over-counted in the popular imagination and correctly counted in the official one gets the official allocation and the popular resentment.
It matters because it distorts every rate. Divide a real number of clinics by an imaginary population and you get a crisis. Divide it by the real one and you get a different, more accurate and still serious picture. Bad denominators produce bad policy.
It matters because credibility is cumulative. When residents point out that the headline number is wrong and are ignored, they reasonably conclude that the rest of the coverage is no more careful.
And it matters because the exaggeration does not actually help. Kibera’s real conditions are difficult enough to make the case unaided. You do not need to quadruple the population to justify a sewer.
What we would ask
Of colleagues in the media: cite the census, note the range of credible estimates, and stop repeating one million. If you must use a range, say so.
Of organisations fundraising on Kibera: your work does not need the inflated figure and your donors deserve the real one.
Of government: publish ward-level census and service data in a form residents can actually use. The reason bad numbers circulate is that good ones are hard to find. At the time of writing the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics website was returning gateway errors, which rather makes the point.
KNN’s own style from here is to use census-derived figures, to state the year, and to note where estimates differ. If we get it wrong, tell us.
KNN Newsroom is the staff byline for stories written, rewritten and edited at the Kibra News Network desk. Where a story credits an outside outlet, the original source is linked at the foot of the piece.
