Loreenatenge/kenya-debt-crisis-analysis

# Were the Warning Signs Visible? Evidence from Kenya's Debt Sustainability Indicators (1980–2024) Kenya's public debt has come under increasing scrutiny following a sharp rise in debt service costs, a depreciating shilling, and the signing of a new IMF programme in 2024. These pressures did not emerge suddenly. They developed over years, shaped by a structural shift toward commercial borrowing from 2014 onward, compounded by external shocks including COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war. The question this project asks is whether the data was signalling these pressures before they became critical. Using World Bank data from 1980 to 2024, I tracked Kenya's performance against two IMF debt sustainability thresholds, external debt to GNI (40%) and debt service to exports (15%), and identified when each indicator began crossing its limit. The analysis involved threshold comparison, trend analysis, and a structured timeline of key debt events. The full pipeline was built in Python using pandas, matplotlib,numpy, seaborn,requests and Streamlit. The central finding is that debt service to exports crossed the 15% IMF threshold in 2018, five years before external debt to GNI crossed its 40% limit in 2023. Between 2017 and 2019, the debt service ratio rose by 23.8 percentage points in just two years, a deterioration that was visible in publicly available data. This suggests that flow indicators like debt service to exports can serve as earlier warning signals than stock indicators like total debt, with direct implications for how debt sustainability is monitored across sub-Saharan Africa. ## Live Dashboard [Link will be added after deployment] ## Tools Python, pandas, matplotlib, seaborn, numpy, requests, Streamlit ## Data Source World Bank (World Development Indicators) ## Project Structure - data/ — raw and cleaned datasets - notebooks/ — exploratory analysis and visualizations - src/ — data fetching and cleaning scripts - dashboard/ — Streamlit app ## Author Lo …