About Us

Kenya’s Single Registry is a policy tool that enables the government of Kenya to link together the Management Information Systems (MISs) of social protection programmes in Kenya across the National Social Protection Policy (NSPS) thematic areas of income security, social health insurance, shock responsive social protection and Complementary social protection. The Single Registry currently links principally five social assistance schemes (the Old Age Grant, Disability Benefit, Orphans and Vulnerable Children’s Cash Transfer, Hunger Safety Net programme, and World Food Programme’s (WFP) Cash for Assets scheme). Furthermore, the Single Registry is linked to the Integrated Population Registration System (IPRS), so that programme beneficiaries can be authenticated by their national ID numbers. Broadly, the aim is to expand the Single Registry linkages to include social security and health insurance so as to make it an effective tool for monitoring social protection interventions at the national and county levels.

Enhanced Single Registry (ESR) is the socio-economic database of the poor and vulnerable households in Kenya. The foremost objective of the ESR is to collect, update and link data of households and persons in poverty and help programs to select and provide services to beneficiaries.

The ESR establishes the most inclusive eligibility criteria possible for the purpose of data collection so as to encompass most programs. It also provides the basic data that most programs need to select beneficiaries.

Since the inception of the cash transfers in 2004, the programs were operating independent management information systems. In 2014 the state department for social protection developed a single registry whose purpose is to create a platform that integrates data from all the four CT programs run by the government. Recently in Kenya, each of the programs feeding into the Single Registry has been performing their own registration processes. This approach by the programs resulted in overlapping activities with possibilities of collecting data from persons living in households already registered by another program. This often resulted in community fatigue, inefficient use of resources and a lack of standardized data. The rationale for the ESR is that as social protection coverage grows, integrating and harmonizing data collection efforts can achieve greater efficiency gains.

The main objective of the ESR is to collect, update and link data of households and persons in poverty and help programs to select and provide services to beneficiaries. Other objectives include:

To allow promotion of social protection policies/programmes that link individuals to different protection interventions along the life cycle.
To enable roll out of specific responses to particular emergency/shock situations in specific counties and geographical locations to boost resilience.
To facilitate linkages to pertinent complementary services.