Kenya is an east African country of 57m people from 40 ethnic groups. For the past two decades it has been one of the more politically stable and economically successful countries on the continent. Its president, William Ruto, has promoted the export of Kenyan workers as a deliberate economic strategy, arguing that "Kenya's workforce is our greatest resource." The government has a dedicated cabinet ministry for diaspora affairs, which holds jobs fairs across the country.
In 2024 anti-government demonstrations, dubbed the "Gen Z" protests because they were led by young people outraged at a planned tax rise, resulted in at least 63 deaths and many arrests and abductions. Mr Ruto backed down and scrapped the proposed tax increase. Unlike past Kenyan protests, the demonstrators were united not along ethnic lines but by frustration over poor living standards and lack of opportunity.
On June 25th 2025, 19 people were killed and hundreds injured after police opened fire on fresh protests. The government banned live television coverage of the unrest until a court intervened. The protesters were furious at the death of an opposition blogger in police custody and were marking the anniversary of the 2024 demonstrations. The interior minister denounced the protests as a "coup attempt" by "criminal anarchists" and commended the police on their restraint. The police deny responsibility for abductions of government critics, but survivors say they were tortured and questioned about the protests. Several global companies have left or scaled back operations in Kenya, deterred by the erosion of the rule of law; GlaxoSmithKline and Procter & Gamble are among those that have pulled out since 2022. Local bosses complain of pressure and intimidation by government officials, for instance to hand over stakes in their companies. Some firms have set up holding companies in Mauritius or Dubai to protect themselves.
According to TIFA Research, a pollster, just 14% of Kenyans believe the country is heading in the right direction, down from 37% in early 2023. Half say they have no confidence at all in the integrity of elections scheduled for 2027. Tens of thousands protested in at least 27 of Kenya's 47 counties in June 2025, some of the biggest anti-government mobilisations since multiparty democracy was restored in the 1990s.
The economy grew by 4.8% in 2024, and the shilling has strengthened, thanks in part to a $1.5bn bond sale in February 2024. Inflation has slowed.
After USAID was forced shut, Kenya secured a $1.6bn bilateral health deal with the Trump administration, requiring Kenya to increase its own health spending by $850m. The deal was awaiting review in early February 2026 following concerns over the lack of parliamentary consultation and worries that the government could breach data-protection laws by offering America access to patients' health records.
China is increasingly investing in manufacturing in Kenya, particularly at Tatu City, a special economic zone. In 2025 Chinese foreign direct investment in manufacturing across Africa surged to $12.3bn across 64 new projects—the highest number in a single year in at least a decade. Tatu City is in talks with over 1,000 Chinese companies. Six of seven flagship Chinese projects announced in 2025 in Kenya, including a steel plant and a garment factory, have already begun construction. Chinese firms are attracted by Africa's rapid population growth, improving economic prospects and higher margins than at home—prices for items like plasters can be three to four times higher than in China. John Mwendwa, the head of Kenya's investment authority, says never before has Africa been so attractive to Chinese manufacturers.
Kenya plans to convert dollar-denominated Chinese loans into yuan, part of a broader trend of China's financial diplomacy through the Belt and Road Initiative.
In 2025 Kenya expanded tax relief on pension contributions, leading to an influx of deposits.
Some 25% of electricity in Kenya is lost to technical hitches, theft or unpaid bills. More than half of urban Kenyans now use liquid petroleum gas as their main cooking fuel. LPG is exempt from VAT. Firms are putting meters on gas canisters so consumers can pay as they go. Charcoal use is declining in Kenyan cities, though it remains dominant in poorer countries where alternatives are scarce.
Kenya hosts some of the world's largest outsourcing firms and is positioned as the next frontier for business-process outsourcing (BPO) in Africa. The BPO growth rate in Kenya is projected at 19% a year between 2023 and 2028, according to Genesis Analytics, a consultancy. Wages are 60-70% lower than in America, Europe and Australia; BPO workers in Kenya earn around $233 a month, compared with $284 in the Philippines. CCI Global, one of the largest operators, has a call centre seating 5,000 workers. Adept Technologies, one of Kenya's first BPO firms, was founded in 2006 by Mercy Mugure.
A national BPO policy, due in July 2025, aims to create 1m jobs in the sector over the following five years. Former content moderators in Kenya have sued Meta and Sama, a Californian BPO company, over working conditions. Meta subsequently moved its content-moderation work from Kenya to Ghana.
Kenya's security forces have been accused of colluding with Uganda and Tanzania to crush dissent. Kizza Besigye, a Ugandan opposition leader, was kidnapped on a visit to Kenya in November 2024 and rendered to a military jail in Uganda; Kenya admitted it had co-operated. In July 2025 Mwabili Mwagodi, a Kenyan critic of Mr Ruto, was seized by unknown assailants while working at a hotel in Tanzania and handed over to the Kenyan authorities battered and bruised. In January 2025 Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a Tanzanian democracy activist, was kidnapped by masked men on the streets of Nairobi. After a Ugandan journalist was arrested and tortured in Tanzania in May, Mr Ruto apologised to Tanzania for "anything that Kenyans have done that is not right".
Kenya's intelligence agency reckons more than 1,000 Kenyans have been involved in Russia's war in Ukraine, with 89 still on the front line as of early 2026. Many were recruited under false pretences by agencies promising civilian jobs in Russia. An agency called Global Face Human Resources promised free flights, a visa and a sign-on bonus worth more than $10,000; recruits who arrived in St Petersburg were instead presented with the choice of signing a military contract or paying 2.4m roubles ($31,000) to leave. On February 26th 2026 the agency's Kenyan founder was charged with human trafficking. The government has closed hundreds of unlicensed recruitment agencies and called on Russia to stop enlisting its citizens.
Of Kenya's 55m people, 9m depend on sugar for their livelihood. But politically connected traders known as "sugar barons" have spent decades extracting vast rents from a regime of strict import licences and state-controlled prices. A World Bank study found Kenya has more explicit restrictions on competition than nearly every other country it surveyed for both producing and trading sugar. A sweeping law passed in 2024 centralised price controls and weakened farmers' bargaining power by forcing them to sell cane to specific mills. The sector is dominated by a small number of firms suspected of being cosy with the government, several of them family-owned; a single company controls nearly half the industry through its mills. State-owned mills have been purposefully under-mechanised to maximise local employment and badly run as tools for political patronage, often failing to pay farmers for their cane for months or years.
The Ruto administration has leased four inefficient state-owned mills to private investors (as of 2025) and at least seven private mills have entered the market in the past five years. In January 2026 Kenya fulfilled a 24-year-old promise to lift restrictions on sugar imports from COMESA, a regional trade bloc. Farmers in western Kenya say the new private owners are paying on time.
The IMF predicts GDP growth of nearly 5% in 2026; inflation is stable at 4.3%. The World Bank estimates that trimming subsidies and removing regulations that benefit political insiders in electricity, transport and agri-business could add nearly 1.4 percentage points to annual GDP growth and create more than 400,000 new jobs per year. The state plans to sell a $1.6bn stake in Safaricom, the country's largest mobile-network operator, in part to raise capital for a national infrastructure fund. An IPO for the state-run pipeline firm was launched in February 2026. Critics say the Privatisation Act, passed in 2025, grants too much power to the president and treasury secretary, raising corruption concerns. An election in 2027 increases the incentive to backtrack on reforms that reduce the potential for patronage.
Kenya struck a migration deal with Germany in 2024 under which Kenya agreed to speed up the removal of illegal Kenyan migrants in Germany and to help recruit workers at home; Germany pledged support for language skills and vocational training. The government has aimed to send 1m Kenyans abroad per year for three years, roughly equivalent to the number of new entrants to the Kenyan workforce annually. Large numbers of Kenyans work in the Gulf states; Saudi Arabia is the second-largest source of remittances to Kenya, after America but ahead of Britain and the EU. Reports of abuse are common: a survey found that 99% of Kenyans working in the Gulf claimed to have been mistreated by their employers. Members of the Kenyan political elite own some of the employment firms that send workers to the Gulf.
In May 2026 Nairobi hosted the first France-Africa summit ever held in an English-speaking country. Emmanuel Macron cooked with a Kenyan influencer, ran with Eliud Kipchoge and signed over $1bn in bilateral deals with Kenya, including an $820m joint venture to revamp a port terminal in Mombasa. In total €14bn of French public and private investment and €9bn of African investment were signed off. A new Ipsos poll suggested 93% of Kenyans have a good image of France.
Life is like a simile.