by Peter Orengo
Kenya will look at the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) data with pride after the country supplanted rivals Ethiopia to East Africa’s biggest economy.
President Uhuru Kenyatta would carefully look at the figures and pat his team for a job well down as figures show an impressive outlook.
With a projected gross domestic product (GDP) – the monetary value of all goods and services produced in a country – of Sh9.9 trillion in 2019, Kenya’s economy is bigger than that of all the countries in the East and Central Africa.
Moreover, IMF expects Kenya to remain at the pole position in the next four years, with the country’s GDP touching Sh15.8 trillion by 2024.
Ethiopia is the second largest economy with an estimated GDP of Sh9.1 trillion as of 2019, having been overtaken by Kenya in 2017.
Tanzania has a GDP of Sh6.2 trillion while that of Uganda is Sh3.66 trillion.
Rwanda, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, has a GDP of Sh1 trillion, which is just about the size of Nakuru’s economy, according to a survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).
The GDP for Burundi and South Sudan is Sh357 billion and Sh368 billion respectively as at 2019, IMF data shows.
After 22-years of being the undisputed economic champion in the region, Addis Ababa beat Nairobi to become the largest economy in 2016, dealing a blow to Jubilee administration which had only been in power for three years by then.
Increased investments in infrastructure, coupled with a strong macro-economic environment, seems to have helped Kenya beat Ethiopia which is in a political quagmire as it edges closer to elections this year.