Abstract:

Present day Kenya became a British colony at the conclusion of the Berlin Conference of 1884/1885. Initially a company, the Imperial British East African Company, administered the colony on behalf of the British government. The colonial state was to all intents and purposes not a developmental state.  It  adopted  policies  geared  towards  extracting  as much resources  from the people as it could without investing the  same  in the social and economic development of the indigenous people. The state spent its energies developing regions occupied by British colonial settlers.  The result was that some regions of the country developed while others stagnated or experienced underdevelopment.  While poor people are  found in both the developed and the disadvantaged regions, the severity of poverty was harsher among the people in the disadvantaged regions.