Is Kenya a Protest Nation?

Every day there are about three protests in the country. It may be a few farmers blocking a road, students challenging their school fees prices, workers demanding fair wages or thousands of young people marching through the streets.

In a healthy democracy, protest is the pulse of a people. It shows that citizens are awake, alert and still believe change is possible. However, when that pulse beats daily, without pause, it also signals pressure, pain and systems straining under their own weight.

What Defines Each Protest Year?

Each year of protests in this dataset carries its own character, shaped by the economy, the political climate, and the widening gap between what citizens are promised and what they receive.

2025 was the year of reckoning with abductions, impunity and unfinished grief. State-sanctioned disappearances of activists and critics triggered protests that were unlike any in the dataset. Justice for Albert Ojwang, who died in police custody, became a national rallying point. On 25th June 2025, exactly one year after protesters stormed Parliament, Kenyans returned to the streets. Their aim was to remind the state that they had not forgotten, and that the dead had not yet received justice.

2026 has been defined by the cost of fuel and the safety of schools. The #RejectFuelPrice movement drove sustained protests against a proposed increase in pump prices, while a wave of high-school protests spread across the country, pushing counties like Embu into the national top ten for the first time. In Laikipia, opposition to a proposed Ebola treatment facility added a public-health flashpoint to the mix. In just the first half of the year, protests already reached 453, a 29% jump on the same period in 2025, putting the country on pace to match or exceed last year's total in half the time.

Two years, two distinct moments. A country in which the gap between what citizens are promised and what they receive keeps generating protest, whatever the specific trigger of the moment.

Why Do They Protest: The Triggers?

Economic freedom tops every other category at 493 protests. Kenyans are not primarily protesting about who is in power but what that power is failing to do, which is to keep food affordable, wages liveable, and public services functional.

Social freedoms represent a growing category. Protests around housing and education are slowly finding their voice on the streets.

Protester's Actions: What Do They Do?

Despite the tension, Kenyans overwhelmingly choose peaceful means to make themselves heard. That alone is a powerful indictment of any narrative that tries to paint protestors as violent. Road blockages and strikes tell a different story of urgency. When institutions do not listen, citizens disrupt the daily rhythm of the country to make neglect impossible to ignore. Riots and clashes are pressure points, often shaped by state response, frustration, and desperation.

The Police Go-To Weapons

Under Police Use of Force and Firearms rules, the Kenyan police must use non-violent, verbal methods like warnings and negotiation before moving to less-lethal means like batons, tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets. Firearms must only be allowed to protect life. All force must be lawful, necessary, proportional, and accountable.

Kenya's Protest Capitals: The Top Counties By Ranking

Protests concentrate in urban counties like Nairobi, Nakuru and Kiambu where dense populations, youth networks, and media presence make mobilisation easier and more visible. Sparsely populated counties like Samburu, Mandera, Wajir, and Tana River may record fewer protests due to weaker networks, poor media coverage, and tighter state action.

hover a county to see total protests and breakdown by reason category

How was this data collected?

We defined a protest as a collective public action expressing disapproval of, objection to, or demand for action on a policy, institution, authority, condition, or public issue. Following this definition, we included as a protest any form of march, go-slow, picket, demonstration, sit-in, riot, strike, work stoppage, or confrontation involving the police. This is consistent with the right guaranteed under Article 37 of the Constitution: "Every person has the right, peaceably and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket, and to present petitions to public authorities."

This dataset is the product of a three-stage approach combining automated and manual research. Stage 1 (automated search) used code to run targeted searches against Google's RSS/News index, returning articles matching our keyword specifications; the resulting set was then human-reviewed and deduplicated. Stage 2 (manual search) filled in protests that don't get reported as news or aren't indexed in Google's RSS feed, using a search string built around terms including "protest," "demonstration," "maandamano," "riot," "unrest," "picket," "go slow," "strike," "boycott," "teargas," "clashes," "barricade," and "took to the streets." Stage 3 (YouTube search) used a parallel search string to catch protests that don't make it into print or standard news coverage.

Data on deaths, injuries, and arrests is sourced from the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), Amnesty International Kenya, and the Ministry of Interior & National Administration. These bodies do not always report on the same incidents, and when they do, their figures sometimes differ. Where more than one source reports on what is clearly the same protest period, we use the highest figure reported for that period rather than adding the figures together, since summing competing counts of the same events would overstate the true total; figures for non-overlapping periods are added together as normal. The deaths/injuries/arrests counters on this site reflect specific high-impact "hot month" dates called out by these sources, not a comprehensive year-round tally, so they are presented as "at least" figures.

Where available, protest locations were identified through direct references in the news articles. It was not possible to geotag or report all protests with precise geographic coordinates. In such cases, the nearest identifiable location, such as a constituency, sub-county, or another recognisable administrative area, was used. Coordinates were then assigned based on these approximated locations for mapping purposes.

For each documented protest, we aimed to identify whether there was any official response from authorities or public institutions. Some protests did not elicit any official response at the time the stories were published. In such cases, the dataset reflects the absence of available responses rather than assuming that none occurred.

Certain protests took place over multiple days, making it difficult to capture exact start and end dates with precision. For these cases, reported timelines were used as faithfully as possible, although discrepancies in reporting styles across media outlets remain a known limitation.

Want to record a protest for us to consider? Click here and share the date, location, organiser, purpose, and at least two sources of information.

Got suggestions on how we can improve the Freedom Index? Email us team@odipodev.com.

Except where otherwise noted, content in this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode. Where material is attributed to a copyright owner other than Amnesty International or Odipo Dev, that material is not subject to the Creative Commons licence.

This is a product of Odipo Dev in collaboration with Amnesty International Kenya.