Kenyan Open Datasets: Where to Find Real Data to Practise On

McTaba runs coding and data bootcamps in Kenya. This guide is written to be useful whether or not you ever join one.

A portfolio on the Titanic passenger list tells an employer nothing about you. A chart of county populations, or of mobile payment totals from the central bank, shows you can handle messy public data on a question Kenyans care about. This list is part of our data science career map.

We opened every link below on 3 November 2026 and list only sources that loaded. Government sites move pages often, so expect some paths to change. If a link breaks, search the site by its name.

Check each source's licence or terms before you republish its data. Cite it in your project.

Source	What is inside	Format	Checked
Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS)	Economic Survey, statistical abstracts, county statistical abstracts, CPI and inflation, quarterly GDP, gross county product, the 2019 census, labour force and demographic health reports	Mostly PDF reports; portals for survey microdata	3 November 2026
Kenya Open Data portal	Government datasets, many with maps. The site now runs on the ArcGIS Hub platform	Depends on the dataset, often CSV or map layers	3 November 2026
Central Bank of Kenya statistics	Exchange rates, the Central Bank Rate, KESONIA, treasury bills and bonds, balance of payments, inflation, mobile payments, diaspora remittances	Web tables and PDF reports	3 November 2026
Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), Kenya	Humanitarian and development datasets: boundaries, population, health, food security. Its search reported 656 datasets matching "kenya" in our check	CSV, Excel, shapefile and others, by dataset	3 November 2026
World Bank Data, Kenya	World Development Indicators on people, economy, environment and institutions	CSV, XML, Excel and an API	3 November 2026
World Bank Microdata Library	Household and enterprise survey data from many countries, including Kenya	Survey files, with documentation	3 November 2026
The DHS Program	Demographic and Health Surveys: births, child health, family planning, household assets	Survey files, with documentation. Read the site for how to request access	3 November 2026
openAFRICA	A volunteer-run repository of open data from across Africa, searchable for Kenyan sets	Varies by dataset	3 November 2026

Sources: KNBS, Kenya Open Data, CBK, HDX, World Bank Data, DHS, openAFRICA, checked on 3 November 2026.

Our Data Science to AI Engineering programme has you finish 24 weekly projects, so public data like this gets plenty of use.

The World Bank is the easiest start because it has a plain web API. This code pulls Kenya's total population by year. Run it, then plot it.

import json
import urllib.request
import pandas as pd

url = ("https://api.worldbank.org/v2/country/KE/"
       "indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?format=json&per_page=100")
with urllib.request.urlopen(url, timeout=30) as r:
    rows = json.load(r)[1]
pop = pd.DataFrame(rows)[["date", "value"]].dropna()
pop["year"] = pop["date"].astype(int)
print(pop.sort_values("year").tail(3))

The API answers with two parts: a header, then the rows, which is why the code takes the item at position 1. Swap the indicator code for another from the World Bank site to get a different series.

Project ideas by source

• KNBS county abstracts: compare two counties on a question you care about, using the tables in the PDF. Data science in Kenyan agriculture shows where this leads.
• CBK mobile payments and exchange rates: chart how payment totals move over time.
• HDX and DHS: health and population questions. See data science in Kenyan healthcare.

PDF tables need extra work. The pdfplumber method in analysing your M-Pesa statement applies to them too.

Kaggle hosts competition data and user uploads. For a mobile money practice set, see mobile money fraud detection with machine learning. To learn the platform itself, read Kaggle for beginners.

Pick one question, one source and one chart. Write what you cleaned and what you assumed. Then publish it, since employers ask about projects like this.

If you would like a cohort, mentors and a capstone to go with it, see our Data Science to AI Engineering programme, starting 11 January 2027 at KES 140,000.