The writer of the article told Africa Check that her source for this claim was the World Bank.
The bank reports the number of suicide deaths in a year per 100,000 population, citing the World Health Organization (WHO) as the source of the data.
Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesperson for the WHO, referred us to the 2019 suicide estimates from the agency’s 183 member states.
Estimates were derived from modelling data for many countries, including Kenya, which was classified as having a data quality score of four, meaning that “death registration data are unavailable or unusable due to quality issues”.
Modelled estimates are used to indicate prevalence when high quality data is not available. This approach has its weaknesses, but it is preferable to assuming, for example, that there are no suicides.
We asked an expert in Kenya if better data was available.
“We do not have a suicide registry in the country, so we rely on the WHO suicide estimates,” Dr Linnet Ongeri, a psychiatrist and a scientist who has written extensively on mental health and suicide, told Africa Check
She is also an acting deputy director at the Kenya Medical Research Institute.
Suicide registries are databases maintained by countries on suicides and suicide attempts. They also provide important information on demographics, risk factors and trends. The data collected enables countries to identify risk factors and develop ways to improve mental health and reduce suicide.
We checked the WHO’s 2019 estimates, the most recent data, and compared Kenya’s figures with those of the rest of Africa. Jasarevic said that to compare countries, you had to assume a standard population, or that countries had the same distribution of the population across age groups. This is known as the age-standardised mortality rate.
In other words, it adjusts for different age structures in order to compare more accurately how common suicide is among different groups.
Of the 46 sub-Saharan African countries for which data was collected, Kenya ranked 27th, with an age-standardised rate of 11.
At the top of the list were Lesotho, with an age-standardised mortality rate of 87.5 per 100,000 people, followed by Eswatini, with 40.5 and Zimbabwe with 23.6.
There are at least 25 other sub-Saharan countries ahead of Kenya in terms of suicide rates. We therefore rate this claim as incorrect.
