Social Protection in Kenya has experienced significant growth in the past few years; this includes the exponential growth in the number of beneficiaries households covered  under government led social assistance to the current over 1.5 million in 2023 from all the counties under social assistance. This growth, however, has been plagued by a number of challenges. The main challenge has been fragmentation and lack of coherent coordination mechanisms, which results in missed opportunities for ensuring efficiency of the investments made. Consequently, duplication of effort and parallel implementation structures do not optimize the limited capacity or support a coherent approach to capacity building across the sector.

As part of efforts to address this challenge, the National Social Protection Secretariat (NSPS) has developed an Enhanced Single Registry System for the social protection programmes as part of the implementation of National Social Protection Policy and the Vision 2030. 

Enhanced Single Registry (ESR) is the socio-economic database of the vulnerable households in Kenya.  

It provides a single platform where common and essential information across social protection programmes are stored, analyzed and reported for the benefit of the stakeholders. The ESR also provides checks against one beneficiary receiving multiple benefits within and across programmes.

The main objective of the ESR is to collect, update and link data of vulnerable persons and households for programmes to select and provide services to beneficiaries.

Other objectives include:

 To promote social protection policies and programmes that link individuals to different protection interventions along the life cycle.

 To enable roll out of specific responses to particular emergency/shock situations in specific counties and geographical locations to boost resilience.

 To facilitate linkages to pertinent complementary services.

 To facilitate linkages to pertinent complementary services.

 Provide increased harmonization and consolidation of fragmented social protection schemes through comprehensive oversight of all social protection initiatives

 To provide a single platform where common and essential information across social protection programmes are stored, analyzed and reported for the benefit of the stakeholders.

  To provide checks against one beneficiary receiving multiple benefits within and across programme

 Helps in the elimination of fraud by ensuring that beneficiary details are verified electronically against the 30 million National Population Registry (IPRS) database. This ensures that the programmes pay only genuine beneficiaries.

 Expose potential area(s) for social protection effort(s)

The Enhanced Single Registry is a web portal that allows anyone with internet access to gather key statistics regarding the programs that are linked and hosted in the ESR. Authorized users, such as the implementing officers can gain access to the restricted area which provides more information on actual and potential beneficiaries of the social assistance programs that are linked to the ESR.

The following are some of the benefits of the Single Registry:

 Efficient program monitoring

 Reduced double registration

 Increased transparency and accountability

 Seamless and efficient transfer of data

 Enhanced quality of operations and services for field officers

 Baseline Data for future programs

To collect data of the vulnerable kenyans, the ESR utilizes the Harmonized Targeting Tool (HTT) which is embedded in the ESR mobile application and used by social protection stakeholders in administration of the Household Living Conditions Survey Questionnaire at household level during data collection.