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NCBNational Capability Benchmark
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Choose a score and give the benchmark a specific reason to reconsider it.

When you submit, the form attaches the current score and confidence for the country and capability you chose.

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Where does Kenya stand on Adaptability?

Dataset 9.3.0

This page reads one capability from the published data and is recomputed with every release. It separates what Kenya does, which makes the score, from what the country has, which sits beside the score, and places the country among the 10 countries at the nearest income. The text describes the data and recommends no policy.

What does the score rest on?

Score58.7Confidence0.58usable evidence

The Adaptability score is the equal-weight mean of the positions of four indicators on a 0 to 100 scale that every country sets together. Confidence measures the evidence behind the score and sits beside it as a second number.

The Adaptability score tracks GDP per capita at r = 0.53 across 123 countries.

Observed indicators

  • Unemployment rate

    5.4 % of labour force

    World Bank (SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS), 2025

    Position on the scale76.0Peer median77.510 peers with a value

  • Long-term unemployment share

    59 % of unemployed

    ILOSTAT (DF_UNE_TUNE_SEX_AGE_DUR_NB), 2021

    Position on the scale43.1Peer median73.18 peers with a value

  • Export diversification

    0.19 index 0-1, lower = more diversified

    UNCTAD (US.ConcentDiversIndices), 2025

    Position on the scale83.8Peer median62.810 peers with a value

  • New export products

    2.9 % of products not exported competitively at the start

    Harvard Growth Lab (hs92_country_product_year_4.csv (doi:10.7910/DVN/T4CHWJ)), 2024

    Position on the scale31.8Peer median27.310 peers with a value

No comparable source yet, so lowering confidence: disaster preparedness and recovery and institutional responsiveness.

What Kenya has to work with

Beside each condition, two r values read every country at once, one against income and one against the capability score. Where the r with income is much higher than the r with the score, having the condition goes with being rich more than with the capability measured.

Conditions, not scored

What the country has to work with on this capability. The values are shown as the source published them and are not part of the score, the confidence or the trend. The rank counts the countries with a value, best first.

  • Labour force participationWorld Bank (SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS), 2025

    68 % aged 15+, rank 79 of 125. Share of the working-age population in the labour force.

    A condition, not scored: how much of the population is in the labor force at all is what a country has to reallocate, a level set by norms, schooling and age, not a record of it reallocating (D141). Participation norms confound it, especially for India. Adaptability reads reallocation through long-term unemployment and export diversification instead.

    • r with income: 0.45 (123 countries)
    • r with the Adaptability score: 0.27 (125 countries)
    • Peer median: 60.1 % aged 15+ (10 peers with a value)

  • Fixed broadband subscriptionsWorld Bank (IT.NET.BBND.P2), 2024

    3 per 100 people, rank 95 of 125. Fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people.

    A condition, not scored: installed infrastructure is what a country has to change with, not a record of it changing (D122). Penalizes mobile-first countries such as India and South Africa.

    • r with income: 0.87 (123 countries)
    • r with the Adaptability score: 0.5 (125 countries)
    • Peer median: 1.8 per 100 people (10 peers with a value)

  • Electricity transmission lossesWorld Bank (EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS), 2024

    25.8 % of output, rank 111 of 117. Power lost in transmission and distribution, including unbilled use.

    A condition, not scored: the state of the grid, and whether its operator can bill what it delivers, is infrastructure a country has to change with, not a record of it changing (D141). Read it beside broadband, the other installed network beside Adaptability.

    • r with income: 0.5 (115 countries)
    • r with the Adaptability score: 0.49 (117 countries)
    • Peer median: 16.3 % of output (10 peers with a value)

  • Informal employmentILOSTAT (DF_SDG_0831_SEX_ECO_RT), 2019

    86.5 % of employment, rank 81 of 102. Informal employment as a share of total employment, SDG indicator 8.3.1.

    A condition, not scored: how much work carries no contract, registration or social protection describes the labor market a country reallocates through, not it reallocating (D150). Read it beside the unemployment rate: where most work is informal, a person who loses a job takes any work within weeks, so a low rate is not a fluid market. Its direction for Adaptability cannot be defended, since informal work is both the slack that absorbs a shock and the precarity that keeps a worker from moving up, so the rank orders values and is not a verdict. Comparability is weak: the European values come from an income survey (EU-SILC) with a proxy definition, and the rest from labor force or household surveys processed by the ILO. ILOSTAT has no value for the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Israel, Malaysia, China, the Philippines or Cuba, and some values are old (Haiti and Nicaragua 2012).

    • r with income: 0.89 (101 countries)
    • r with the Adaptability score: 0.46 (102 countries)
    • Peer median: 82.6 % of employment (9 peers with a value)

Where does Kenya sit among its peers?

The peers are the 10 countries at the nearest income. Income is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, in constant international dollars, for the latest year the World Bank publishes, and distance is measured on a log scale, where half and double are equally far. No country is picked by hand, and the set changes when the data does.

In this release peer income runs from US$ 5,062 to US$ 7,878, and Kenya has US$ 5,995 (2025).

0255075100Kenya
  • Solid ring: usable or good evidence
  • Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
  • The shaded band is the middle half of the set and the line inside it is the median.
  • Myanmar: 82.9
  • Kyrgyzstan: 73.6
  • Pakistan: 69.8
  • Honduras: 64.1
  • Kenya: 58.7
  • Nepal: 57.0
  • Ghana: 54.1
  • Tajikistan: 54.1
  • Côte d'Ivoire: 48.2
  • Zimbabwe: 45.6
  • Republic of the Congo: 10.5

What separates Kenya from its peers?

Kenya scores 58.7 on Adaptability, above the median of the 10 scored peers, which is 55.6.

Indicators placed above the peer median on the scale: export diversification and new export products.

Indicators placed below the peer median on the scale: unemployment rate and long-term unemployment share.

Kenya has more than the peer median of labour force participation, fixed broadband subscriptions, electricity transmission losses, and informal employment.

On electricity transmission losses and informal employment, a lower value is better.

Each sentence compares one position with one median. Why a difference exists, and what to do about it, lie outside this data.

What this reading does not show

  • A national score is a coarse proxy. A capability forms in firms, cities, networks and groups below the level of the country, and a national average only describes the conditions they work in.
  • Peers share income and nothing else. Size, production structure, region and political regime are outside the rule, and a set of 10 countries can change with any revision to GDP.
  • An r reads the whole set at once and says nothing about one country alone. A correlation does not show a cause either.
  • Long-term unemployment comes from ILOSTAT, after a plausibility gate applied the same way to every country. Some scored countries use a household survey instead of a labor force survey. A high share reads two ways: slow reallocation where unemployment is also high, or a small residual pool where it is low. For Kenya, the ILOSTAT series comes from a household survey, and the ILO flags the value unreliable. (decision D120)
  • Export diversification reads the concentration of the merchandise basket UNCTAD publishes. How fast a country switches products is outside it, so are services, and countries selling a few high-value products read as concentrated. (decision D119)
  • New export products counts the merchandise lines a country entered over fifteen years, from the Growth Lab's trade data. Exports are gross, so a re-export hub counts what passes through it, and a country that does not report its trade is read from its partners' records. A window this long moves little from one release to the next. (decision D149)
  • And the ones every score in the benchmark carries: artefact A8, artefact A10.