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Kenya
Let's explore one of the world's most fascinating countries — packed with surprises, stories, and pen pal potential.
The Basics
3 Things That Will Blow Your Mind
Genuinely. You'll want to tell someone immediately.
The African continent is slowly splitting apart and it runs right through Kenya
The East African Rift Valley is a crack in the Earth's crust that runs for thousands of kilometres through Kenya and is slowly tearing the African continent into two separate pieces. It moves a few centimetres per year and geologists estimate that in about 5 to 10 million years a new ocean will form where the rift currently is. The valley is so enormous and dramatic that it is clearly visible from space.
There is a national park full of lions and giraffes inside Nairobi city limits
Nairobi National Park sits less than 7 kilometres from the centre of one of Africa's largest and busiest cities. Lions, leopards, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and hundreds of other species live freely in the park with absolutely nothing between them and the Nairobi skyline. Photographs taken from inside the park show giraffes walking past skyscrapers in the background and they look like they have been edited together but they have not.
Kenya built the world's first widespread mobile money system before most countries had smartphones
M-Pesa launched in Kenya in 2007 when smartphones barely existed and allowed people to send and receive money using basic mobile phones by text message. Today over 90% of Kenyan adults use it for everything from paying school fees to buying groceries to paying electricity bills. Mobile payment systems in rich countries that launched a decade later are still trying to reach the same level of use that Kenya achieved with basic technology in the late 2000s.
Famous For
Long Distance Running
Eliud Kipchoge is the first human being to run a marathon in under two hours. Kenya has won more Olympic medals in long distance running than any other country and produces world record holders at almost every distance above 800 metres. The Rift Valley highlands, where many top runners train, sit at an altitude that develops exceptional lung capacity.
Safari and the Great Migration
Every year approximately 1.5 million wildebeest cross the Mara River in the Masai Mara in what is the largest overland animal migration on Earth. Thousands of them cross at once while crocodiles wait in the river and the event is so dramatic and so predictable that wildlife filmmakers travel from all over the world to film it.
M-Pesa
Kenya invented mobile money and made it work for an entire country before the rest of the world was paying for coffee with their phones. The system was built because millions of Kenyans had no access to banks but almost everyone had a mobile phone and it changed how money moves across East Africa.
Kenyan Tea
Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea and the daily chai is a ritual drunk several times a day across the country. Kenyan masala chai is brewed directly in milk with ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon and is completely different from a teabag in a mug.
Did You Know?
Hakuna Matata is real Swahili and means exactly what The Lion King says it means — no worries, no problems. Swahili is one of Kenya's two official languages and is spoken by over 200 million people across East Africa, making it one of the most widely spoken languages on the continent. Kenyan children learn both Swahili and English from a young age and switch between them and sometimes mix them together in a way called Sheng that adults do not always understand.
Pen Pal Connection
A child in Kenya might write to you about wildebeest crossing a river so packed with animals you cannot see the water, a morning chai that their family has been making the same way for as long as anyone can remember, the view from inside Nairobi National Park looking out at the city skyline past a giraffe, or the fact that hakuna matata is something real people say every day and not a song that a cartoon warthog invented.