Kikuyu was the largest ethnic group in Kenya, accounting for ** percent of the country's population in 2019. Native to Central Kenya, the Kikuyu constitute a Bantu group with more than eight million people. The groups Luhya and Kalenjin followed, with respective shares of **** percent and **** percent of the population. Overall, Kenya has more than 40 ethnic groups.

Information about the ethnic affiliation(s) and characteristics of a human population. Includes, for example, information about: the ethnic groups located within a geographic region, their community social structures, their mutual associations and conflicts with other groups, their historic roles and influence, and the physical distribution of their members. Ethnic groups are human populations whose members identify with each other, usually on the basis of having a common cultural traditions and heritage (for example: as distinguished by customs, language, religious practices, or common history) or a presumed common genealogy or ancestry.

The impact of urban migration on ethnic politics is the subject of longstanding debate. “First generation” modernization theories predict that urban migration should reduce ethnic identification and increase trust between groups. “Second generation” modernization perspectives argue the opposite: urban migration may amplify ethnic identification and reduce trust. We test these competing expectations with a three-wave panel survey following more than 8,000 Kenyans over a 15-year period, providing novel evidence on the impact of urban migration. Using individual fixed effects regressions, we show that urban migration leads to reductions in ethnic identification: ethnicity’s importance to the individual diminishes after migrating. Yet urban migration also reduces trust between ethnic groups, and trust in people generally. Urban migrants become less attached to their ethnicity but more suspicious. The results advance the literature on urbanization and politics and have implications for the potential consequences of ongoing urbanization processes around the world.

Using unique data from one of Africa's largest informal settlements, the Kibera slum in Nairobi, we provide evidence of ethnic patronage in the determination of rental prices and investments. Slum residents pay higher rents and live in lower quality housing (measured via satellite pictures) when the landlord and the locality chief belong to the same ethnicity. Conversely, rental prices are lower, and investments higher when residents and chiefs are co-ethnics. Our identification relies on the exogenous appointment of chiefs and is supported by several tests, including a regression discontinuity design.

Ethnic group map illustrates the extent and distribution of the different ethnic groups within Kenya. Major towns are indicated on the map but no further topographic detail is included.

Who are Africa’s swing voters? This paper argues that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient, core and swing are defined by whether ethnic groups have a co-ethnic leader in the election. For groups with a co-ethnic in the race, there is typically less uncertainty about which party or candidate will best represent the group’s interests. For those without a co-ethnic in the race, uncertainty is often greater, making these voters potentially more receptive to campaign persuasion and more likely to change voting intentions during the campaign. Consistent with these expectations, panel data from Kenya’s 2013 presidential election shows that voters from groups without a co-ethnic in the race were more than two and a half times more likely to change their voting intentions during the campaign period.

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built. This favoritism disappears during periods of democracy.

This dissertation examines ethnic patronage, local conflict, and election fraud in Kenya in three separate essays. Fraud, violence, and ethnicity are difficult to measure, and they often play a central role in narratives and theories about African politics. The essays in this dissertation draw on natural language processing, spatial statistics, and demography to improve measurement of these concepts and, in turn, our understanding of how they function in Kenya. The approaches developed here can be generalized to conflict, ethnicity, and fraud in other contexts. The first essay presents a method for extracting ethnic information from names. Existing methods give biased estimates by ignoring uncertainty in the mapping between names and ethnicity. I apply my improved, approximately unbiased method to data on political appointments from 1963 to 2010 in Kenya, and find that existing narratives about distributive politics do not accord with empirical patterns. The second essay examines patterns of violent ethnic targeting during Kenya's 2007-2008 post-election violence. I focus on patterns of arson, one of the key types of violence used in the Rift Valley. I find that incidence of arson is related to the presence of ethnic outsiders, and even more strongly related to measures of land quality, accessibility, and electoral competition. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that arson caused a significant decrease in the number of Kikuyu and other immigrant ethnic groups registered to vote; no such decline is observed in indigenous ethnic groups. The third essay documents the prevalence of dead voters on Kenya's voter register prior to the contentious 2007 presidential elections, and shows how dead registered voters may have facilitated electoral fraud. Simply accounting for the number of dead voters demonstrates that turnout was greater than 100% in several opposition constituencies, and implausibly high in most of the incumbent president's home province. Ecological inference suggests that ballot-s tuffing occurred in candidate strongholds, rather than competitive constituencies. These results are consistent with the opposition party's allegations of fraud.

This is Kenya population dataset for the census held in 2019. About Kenya 1. The demography of Kenya is monitored by the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics. 2. Kenya is a multi-ethnic state in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. 3. It is inhabited primarily by Bantu and Nilotic populations, with some Cushitic-speaking ethnic minorities in the north. 4. Its total population was at 47 558,296 as of the 2019 census.

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal-agent problem: officers can shirk from the autocrat's demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area's importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an officer, which is a function of the officer's expected benefits from the president winning re-election. Using a dataset of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president's co-ethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition's co-ethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This paper demonstrates one way in which authoritarian state institutions can persist despite the introduction of multi-party elections and prevent full democratization.

Studies of conflict-prone settings claim that political leaders can increase electoral support by appealing to perceived ethnic grievances. Yet there is little empirical research on how appeals to group-based grievances work and the types of voters most likely to respond to such appeals. To explore the political effects of ethnic grievance appeals, we conduct a survey experiment in Kenya’s Rift Valley, a region where a long history of conflict over land has sharpened ethnic tensions. We find that appeals to grievances have surprisingly little effect among most voters. We observe a positive effect only among ethnic “insiders” who feel land insecure, a small share of the sample population. Further, though imprecisely estimated, we show that exposure to prior violence may condition how some individuals respond to the appeals, decreasing support for candidates who employ divisive rhetoric. Finally, the results show that appeals to an ethnic-based land grievance are no more effective than a generic land appeal, indicating that group injustice frames have little effect. From a normative perspective these results are encouraging: they suggest that voters in conflict-prone settings may be less easily swayed by divisive ethnic rhetoric than much of the literature presumes.

FOCUS GROUP DATA FOR PROJECT BY DR. ALBERT OMULO, TITLED "TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF POST-ELECTION VIOLENCE IN KENYA: CITIZENS’ PERSPECTIVES IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE 2017 GENERAL ELECTIONS". This research was approved by the University of the Western Cape IRB#HS 20/1/14, 2020.

First name, last name and country of origin of all researchers with inference accuracy ≥70% for a country whose names were relatively poorly recognized by NamSor (i.e., Kenya).

Descriptive statistics of factors associated with breast lesions among women with breast lumps attending two select teaching and referral hospitals in Kenya (n = 651).

Multivariable analysis of factors associated with breast lesions among women attending two select teaching and referral hospitals in Kenya.

This research project aimed to define a new research agenda for connecting policy on livestock sector development to research on agropastoralist food cultures. The project brought together a group of relevant stakeholders - policy makers and implementers, researchers, development actors, and local community representatives - from East and West Africa. Researchers performed a rapid literature review on policy and cultural aspects relevant to milk production and consumption in the study locations, policy actors explained their activities and some community members took part in participatory photography. The group reviewed the data in a seminar based on the local ‘Baraza’ deliberation format. The data set comprises: A transcript of an interview with a policy actor from Baringo county Kenya, on the dairy value chain and the meaning of milk, in November 2021. A transcript of an interview with elders of the Arror community on rituals that use milk, in November 2021. Transcripts of a set of interviews with milk value chain actors in Ghana in November 2021. Transcripts of two focus groups held in November and December 2021 where participants from the Arror and Ilchamus ethnic groups who had taken part in a participatory photography process explain their photographs and the issues they illustrated to do with milk and culture in their communities. These transcripts are accompanied by the consent form used in the photography exercise. A report from a baraza meeting held in Baringo county, Kenya, where photographers displayed their photographs and explained them, and used these to open dialogue with policy actors at county level, in April 2022. A literature review on cultures of milk in Northern Ghana, associated with the Fulani ethnic group, and Baringo county, Kenya, associated with the Arror and Ilchamus ethnic groups, and also on policies relevant to the dairy sector, and on the state of milk markets, in Ghana and Kenya. The aim of the data collection was to provide material which provided an entry point to understanding the perspectives of each actor group, that each of the stakeholders could react to in a Baraza in order to co-create meaning about the subject matter. The other aim of the data set is to provide the researchers with material they can use to propose the role of culture in contemporary dairy markets, and policy to do with these, in the study regions.

aThe HIV testing response rate is defined as the percentage of eligible persons 15–49 years old who participated in HIV testing. Non-responders included those who refused testing, were absent at the time of the survey or there were technical difficulties with blood taking.HIV prevalence and HIV testing response rates in 15–49 year olds by ethnic group in 2003 and 2008 Kenyan Demographic and Health Surveys.

Understanding the effects of actions undertaken by human societies on crop evolution processes is a major challenge for the conservation of genetic resources. This study investigated the mechanisms whereby social boundaries associated with patterns of ethnolinguistic diversity have influenced the on-farm distribution of sorghum diversity. Social boundaries limit the diffusion of planting material, practices and knowledge, thus shaping crop diversity in situ. To assess the effect of social boundaries, this study was conducted in the contact zone between the Chuka, Mbeere and Tharaka ethnolinguistic groups in eastern Kenya. Sorghum varieties were inventoried and samples collected in 130 households. In all, 297 individual plants derived from seeds collected under sixteen variety names were characterized using a set of 18 SSR molecular markers and 15 morphological descriptors. The genetic structure was investigated using both a Bayesian assignment method and distance-based clustering. Principal Coordinates Analysis was used to describe the structure of the morphological diversity of the panicles. The distribution of the varieties and the main genetic clusters across ethnolinguistic groups was described using a non-parametric MANOVA and pairwise Fisher tests. The spatial distribution of landrace names and the overall genetic spatial patterns were significantly correlated with ethnolinguistic partition. However, the genetic structure inferred from molecular makers did not discriminate the short-cycle landraces despite their morphological distinctness. The cases of two improved varieties highlighted possible fates of improved materials. The most recent one was often given the name of local landraces. The second one, that was introduced a dozen years ago, displays traces of admixture with local landraces with differential intensity among ethnic groups. The patterns of congruence or discordance between the nomenclature of farmers’ varieties and the structure of both genetic and morphological diversity highlight the effects of the social organization of communities on the diffusion of seed, practices, and variety nomenclature.