Science in Kenya

In 2017, Kenya made history by launching the world’s first mobile-only sovereign bond, M-Akiba.

In 2015 Kenya’s matatus became the first informal transit system in the world to have an online map when a team from the University of Nairobi worked with its international partners to begin Digital Matatus.

In 2007, Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Kenya. The platform has since raised an estimated 2% of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty.

In 2000, a fossil finder from the Tugen Hills, Kiptalam Cheboi, uncovered a strange specimen of the little known species Orrorin tugenensis.

In 2015 a team of international researchers excavating at the Lomweki 3 site in West Turkana unearthed the 3.3 million-year-old stone tools that remain the oldest ever discovered.

In 2015, Kenyan paleontologist Frederick Manthi was part of the team that analysed the newly rediscovered fossil of a beaked whale originally found 30 years earlier in West Turkana.

In 2018, archaeologists at the National Museums of Kenya worked with a team of international researchers to discover East Africa’s earliest and largest example of monumental architecture.

To end the problem of East Coast Fever, Kenyan scientists have been working to develop a better, cheaper version of the best vaccine currently available.

In 1949 Anthony Allison, a South-African doctor raised in Kenya, was studying blood samples from Kikuyu, Luo, and Masai people when he first noticed the correlation between malaria resistance and carrying the sickle cell gene.

In 2018 an international team including scientists from the Kenya Agriculture Livestock Research Organisation used computer programs to analyze the DNA of the bacteria that causes bovine pleuropneumonia, or “lung plague.”