The transport sector was hugely affected by the coronavirus, according to the Economic Survey 2021 released on Thursday by Treasury CS Ukur Yatani.
The CS said that the sector’s gross value added declined by 7.8 per cent in 2020 from a growth of 6.3 per cent that was registered in 2019.
Yatani said that some of the restrictions on mobility that were instituted by the government to curb the spread of Covid - 19 dampened the growth of the sector during the review period.
In air transport, the total number of passengers handled dropped by 62.5 per cent from 12.0 million in 2019 to 4.5 million passengers in 2020.
The volume of commercial cargo traffic handled decreased by 8.9 per cent to 341.4 thousand tonnes in 2020.
Railway Transport
The survey indicated that the earnings from passenger traffic dropped to Sh978 million in 2020 compared to Sh1.9 billion in 2019.
The freight earnings decreased significantly from Sh14.0 billion in 2019 to Sh11.6 billion in 2020.
Water transport
During the review period, the total cargo throughput at the port dropped by 0.9 per cent from 34.4 million tonnes in 2019 to 34.1 million tonnes in 2020.
Also, the volume of container traffic handled decreased by 4.0 per cent from 1.4 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) in 2019 to 1.36 million TEUs in 2020.
Pipeline throughput dropped by 3.1 per cent from 7,025.9 thousand cubic metres in 2019 to 6,806.8 thousand cubic metres in 2020.
Tourism Sector
The CS also announced that the number of international arrivals declined by 71.5 per cent to 579.6 thousand in 2020.
Earnings from the sector declined by 43.9 per cent to Sh91.7 billion in 2020.
Hotel Bed-night occupancy contracted by 58.0 per cent to 3,803.3 thousand in 2020.
Edited by D Tarus
