Kenyan consumer prices rose at the slowest pace in almost two years in December, days after the central bank announced the most aggressive interest-rate hike in more than a decade in a bid to tame price growth.
The consumer price index increased by 6.6% from a year earlier, compared with 6.8% in November, the Nairobi-based Kenya National Bureau of Statistics said in an emailed statement on Friday.
That brought the average inflation rate for the year to 7.7%, above the 7.5% ceiling of the central bank’s target range.
Meanwhile, Kenya’s economy grew 5.9% year-on-year in the third quarter of this year compared to 4.3% growth in the same quarter of 2022, official data showed on Friday.
“This growth was mainly supported by a rebound in agricultural activities that had contracted in 2022,” the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) said in a report.
Thanks to favourable weather conditions in the quarter, agriculture, forestry, and fishing grew by 6.7% compared to a contraction of 1.3% in the third quarter of 2022, the KNBS said.
