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Land, healthcare, and education reform

The question of land ownership had deep emotional resonance in Kenya, having been a major grievance against the British colonialists. As part of the Lancaster House negotiations, Britain's government agreed to provide Kenya with £27 million with which to buy out white farmers and redistribute their land among the indigenous population. To ease this transition, Kenyatta made Bruce McKenzie, a white farmer, the Minister of Agriculture and Land. Kenyatta's government encouraged the establishment of private land-buying companies that were often headed by prominent politicians. The government sold or leased lands in the former White Highlands to these companies, which in turn subdivided them among individual shareholders. In this way, the land redistribution programs favoured the ruling party's chief constituency. Kenyatta himself expanded the land that he owned around Gatundu. Kenyans who made claims to land on the basis of ancestral ownership often found the land given to other people, including Kenyans from different parts of the country. Voices began to condemn the redistribution; in 1969, the MP Jean-Marie Seroney censured the sale of historically Nandi lands in the Rift to non-Nandi, describing the settlement schemes as "Kenyatta's colonization of the rift".

In part fuelled by high rural unemployment, Kenya witnessed growing rural-to-urban migration under Kenyatta's government. This exacerbated urban unemployment and housing shortages, with squatter settlements and slums growing up and urban crime rates rising. Kenyatta was concerned by this, and promoted the reversal of this rural-to-urban migration, but in this was unsuccessful. Kenyatta's government was eager to control the country's trade unions, fearing their ability to disrupt the economy. To this end it emphasised social welfare schemes over traditional industrial institutions, and in 1965 transformed the Kenya Federation of Labour into the Central Organization of Trade (COT), a body which came under strong government influence. No strikes could be legally carried out in Kenya without COT's permission. There were also measures to Africanise the civil service, which by mid-1967 had become 91% African. During the 1960s and 1970s the public sector grew faster than the private sector. The growth in the public sector contributed to the significant expansion of the indigenous middle class in Kenyatta's Kenya.

The government oversaw a massive expansion in education facilities. In June 1963, Kenyatta ordered the Ominda Commission to determine a framework for meeting Kenya's educational needs. Their report set out the long-term goal of universal free primary education in Kenya but argued that the government's emphasis should be on secondary and higher education to facilitate the training of indigenous African personnel to take over the civil service and other jobs requiring such an education. Between 1964 and 1966, the number of primary schools grew by 11.6%, and the number of secondary schools by 80%. By the time of Kenyatta's death, Kenya's first universities—the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University —had been established. Although Kenyatta died without having attained the goal of free, universal primary education in Kenya, the country had made significant advances in that direction, with 85% of Kenyan children in primary education, and within a decade of independence had trained sufficient numbers of indigenous Africans to take over the civil service.

Another priority for Kenyatta's government was improving access to healthcare services. It stated that its long-term goal was to establish a system of free, universal medical care. In the short-term, its emphasis was on increasing the overall number of doctors and registered nurses while decreasing the number of expatriates in those positions. In 1965, the government introduced free medical services for out-patients and children. By Kenyatta's death, the majority of Kenyans had access to significantly better healthcare than they had had in the colonial period. Before independence, the average life expectancy in Kenya was 45, but by the end of the 1970s it was 55, the second-highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. This improved medical care had resulted in declining mortality rates while birth rates remained high, resulting in a rapidly growing population; from 1962 to 1979, Kenya's population grew by just under 4% a year, the highest rate in the world at the time. This put a severe strain on social services; Kenyatta's government promoted family planning projects to stem the birth-rate, but these had little success.