Nowcasting Kenya's GDP — the Central Bank's IMF-Assisted Real-Time Growth-Tracking Model

Kenya's official GDP figures, like most developing economies', are published more than three months after each quarter ends — too slow to guide interest-rate decisions in real time. Starting with an IMF Monetary and Capital Markets Department technical-assistance mission to Nairobi in April 2023, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) built a nowcasting framework to close that gap, formally documented in IMF Working Paper 2026/032, "Nowcasting GDP Growth for Kenya."

The model continuously updates a near-term GDP growth estimate as new data arrive: mobile-money transaction volumes (available within about three weeks), then remittances, then trade, money-supply, tourism and electricity data (available within roughly 40 days) — around half the time of the official release. Key swings in the nowcast since 2024 have come from electricity and vehicle-production data, digital-money flows, and goods trade.

The IMF working paper reports that the nowcasting framework "performs well out-of-sample compared to alternative forecasts by the CBK and the IMF" — an explicit, published comparative accuracy result rather than an unverified claim. VoxDev and Business Daily Africa independently covered the same IMF technical work for a general-readership and a business audience respectively. The 2024 IMF Technical Assistance Report that preceded the paper also flagged data-quality caveats: Kenya's underlying business surveys needed strengthening for the nowcast to stay reliable, work the CBK and IMF describe as still ongoing.

Read the full analysis: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/tracking-kenyas-economy-real-time