Cost of living drops for the third consecutive month to 6.84 percent

Kenya's year-on-year inflation rate slowed to 6.84 percent in February from 7.78 percent in the previous month, the statistics office said on Monday.

February's rate is the lowest since October last year, when it stood to 6.72 percent, the statistics office said.

It added the fall was driven by a -0.43 percent monthly drop in the prices of food, which has the biggest weighting in the basket of goods used to measure inflation.

"This resulted from notable decreases in prices of key food items which slightly outweighed the increases," the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement.

Prices of housing and transport also came down on a monthly basis, the bureau said.

The governor of the central bank Patrick Njoroge told Reuters in December he expected inflation to be contained within the government's preferred band of 2.5-7.5 percent.