Assessing salaries earned in foreign country

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

31 October 2021

When I read the report that only 10 out of 300 Kenyan applicants had passed the English proficiency test for nursing jobs in the UK, my immediate reaction was that there must be something wrong with the test. It is perplexing that people who were taught in English from kindergarten up to diploma college failed the test.

As the relevant authorities try to figure out what happened, there is another side to this story that excited the public: the salaries that the nurses are expecting to earn. According to media reports, they range between £2,000 and £3,000 per month. At the current exchange rate of about Sh150 per pound, this comes to about Sh300,000 to Sh450,000. Very exciting amounts, indeed, but should they be?

A salary of sh300,000 per month in Kenya would give you a very comfortable life, but in the UK it’s a different story. According to the Office of National Statistics (the UK’s equivalent to our Kenya National Bureau of Statistics), the average weekly household spending in 2019 (their latest data) was £592. This is about £2,400 per month.

It means that a person earning £2,000 per month would need to very carefully if they are to make any savings. In the UK, £2,000 per month will not afford you the same kind of lifestyle as Sh300,000 would in Kenya.

The website www.expatisan.com is a good source of cost of living information for different parts of the world. According to the site, a 400g loaf of bread is about £1.00 (Sh150) in the UK, a litre of milk is Sh135, while a one-minute call on a mobile phone will put you back some Sh15! By the greatest cost is housing: a furnished studio apartment (what we call bed-sitters in Kenya) costs about £850 or almost Sh130,000 per month.

So, if you are paid £2,000, you will get £1600 after taxes and other statutory deductions. Then you will pay £850 for a bed-sitter leaving you with £750. Then take away another £100 for utilities (electricity, gas, water etc) and now your balance is £650 (about Sh100,000) for all other expenses – food, clothing, travel etc.

The lesson here is that, it can be very misleading to simply convert money earned in a foreign country into Kenyan shillings. It gives the impression that one is earning a lot while in reality, they are barely surviving. Nevertheless, working as a nurse in the UK can give you a better quality of life than doing the same job in Kenya.