Energy poverty affects physical health, well-being, and ability to prosper. A large proportion of Kenyan population lack access to electricity because they are located far from the national grid where it is uneconomical to extend electricity. This paper assesses energy poverty situation in Kirinyaga and reviews its implication on standard of living. Kirinyaga is a rural county with the main economic activity being agriculture and a few agroprocessing factories. Most rural households in Kirinyaga rely on fuel wood to meet their basic energy requirements and lack access to electricity. Tea factories and educational institutions rely on fuel wood to minimize cost of electricity. Kirinyaga residents, therefore, experience energy poverty as indicated by low electricity access and reliance on traditional cooking fuels. Energy poverty in Kirinyaga has negative impact on indicators of standards of living, calorific intake, life expectancy, and literacy levels.

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Urban slums in East Africa exhibit deplorable sanitary conditions. Despite (inter)national efforts, slum sanitation provision remains inadequate and the projected population growth forecasts a worsening of this crisis. The core of the problem is that available knowledge about the local feasibility of the currently applied sanitary methods is limited. This paper analyses the interface of sanitation policy and technology domains by reviewing the distribution and local characteristics of current centralized and decentralized sanitation options. The findings confirm that conventional, centralized sanitation is an unrealistic solution for application in slums. Simplified sewerage may prove appropriate, but the reported initiatives are in the planning phase only. At present, only decentralized sanitation options are found to be viable in the assessed slums, but their servicing is increasingly neglected by the municipal authorities. The quasi-monopoly of pit latrines implies that improved sanitation technologies are not sufficiently rooted yet. Public toilets are crucial to these slums, especially where land tenure issues prevail. Although the potential of ecological sanitation is currently negligible, novel biocenter initiatives are promising. Municipal authorities are advised to prioritize the implementation of elsewhere successful slum sanitation technologies and to integrate appropriate decentral solutions into their predominantly centralized sanitation schemes.