Kenya Freedom Index — Deep Dive
Deaths,
Injuries,
Arrests
& Weapons
A data-driven examination of the human cost of protest in Kenya, 2020–2025
How Many Kenyans Never Made It Back Home After Protests?
Protest-related deaths in Kenya did not rise in a straight line. They rose and fell with the political calendar and with the intensity of repression.
From 2020 to 2022, the numbers were low. Then 2023 brought the first meaningful spike, notably, after President Ruto came to power with around 9 deaths as anti-government demonstrations intensified following the disputed election cycle.
2024 changed everything. 54 deaths in June and July alone. A generation that organised online, marched peacefully, and forced the withdrawal of a major fiscal policy was met with live ammunition. The Finance Bill was withdrawn. The dead were not brought back. No one was held accountable.
2025 was supposed to be different but it was worse. 70 deaths, the highest figure in the entire dataset. On 25th June, marking one year since the Finance Bill protests, IPOA recorded 23 deaths in a single day. On Saba Saba, 7th July, 41 more. Sixty-four deaths in two months. What changed between 2024 and 2025? The answer is in the 15-person difference that nothing changed, and when nothing changes after 54 people die, 70 more follow.
What Do Kenyans Die Fighting For?
According to media reports, the protests most likely to turn deadly in Kenya are political. Political freedom protests carry the highest death toll, followed closely by economic ones. These are protests driven by taxes, rising prices, unemployment, and a cost of living that has outpaced every wage.
Communities protesting land evictions, environmental degradation, and the displacement of people from their homes have also paid with their lives in numbers that demand attention. These are often the most marginalized protesters such as rural communities, indigenous groups, people with fewer resources to document what happened to them and fewer platforms to demand accountability for it.
Who Accounts For Most Fatalities?
Residents and youth account for the most fatalities in this dataset. The two groups who turned out in the largest numbers paid the highest price in lives lost.
Community residents, the ordinary neighbours and locals who make up the backbone of protest in Kenya, and young Kenyans who turned out in historic numbers from 2023 onwards demanding accountability, were killed in disproportionate numbers. Both groups tried to exercise a constitutional right and both paid for it with their lives. They are not just the most active protesters in Kenya, they are also the most targeted.
Innocent Bystanders are also at risk
Not everyone who dies during a protest chose to be there. Bystanders, residents near protest routes, shopkeepers, children in their homes, and passers-by have all been recorded among protest-related deaths in Kenya. Their deaths carry a particular weight. They did not raise a placard neither did they block a road. They simply existed in proximity to a state that was using lethal force indiscriminately.
Boniface Mwangi Kariuki, 22, was a mask vendor working a street corner in Nairobi's central business district on 17 June 2025. He was not a protester. A police officer shot him in the head at close range and he was then declared brain-dead at the Kenyatta National Hospital and died on 30 June. Bridgit Njoki was twelve years old when she was killed on 7 July 2025 during the Saba Saba protests. She was not on the street. She was watching television in her living room when a single bullet pierced the roof of her home, punctured the ceiling, and struck her in the head. She was pronounced dead within hours. Fred Wamale Wanyonyi, a security guard on duty at a mall in central Nairobi, was killed on 25 June 2025 while simply doing his job. These are just but a few examples.
These deaths deserve their own count and their own reckoning. They show that the cost of how Kenya polices the protests is borne not only by those who protest, but by the communities in which protests occur. Every bystander's death is a measure of how far state force has overreached its mandate.
What Were the Total Number of Injuries? (2020-2025)
For four years, protest-related injuries in Kenya stayed below 70 annually. 10 in 2020, 61 in 2021, 31 in 2022, 65 in 2023. Then 2024 happened, 563 injuries in a single year and in 2025, 497. The two highest figures in the entire dataset, back to back, with no sign of the numbers returning to where they were.
The injury numbers do not exist in isolation. They move in the same direction as the deaths. As injuries surged in 2024 to their highest point so did the number of deaths in the five-year period. The two curves point to a pattern that the state response has become progressively more willing to use force against its own citizens. The injuries are not a byproduct of protest. They are a measure of how the state has chosen to respond to it.
Which Protests Result in Most Injuries?
Political freedom protests account for the most injuries, followed closely by economic freedom protests. Together they represent the overwhelming majority of all recorded injuries over this five-year period meaning that nearly every person physically harmed during a protest in Kenya was hurt while demanding either political accountability or economic dignity.
Environmental freedom protests and social freedom protests account for far smaller shares. The numbers are small but they are not insignificant.
What were the nature of Injuries - June 2024 to July 2025
Between June 2024 and July 2025, 226 injuries were recorded as other body injuries which include soft tissue injuries, minor injuries and/or injuries not related to gunshots, teargas or physical assault by police officers. The bullet figure of 114 injuries in just over a year deserves to stand out. These should not be argued as accidental discharges or merely collateral consequences of trying to disperse a crowd. They are targeted uses of lethal force against civilians who were, in most cases, exercising a constitutional right. The 12 teargas canister injuries are equally significant because these occur when the metal canister itself hits a person at high velocity, not only when gas disperses. It is a use of crowd control equipment as a weapon. The nature of injuries in this period tells us something precise about intent. This is not crowd management but rather punishment.
When The Helpers Get Attacked- Medics, Journalists, Civil Society
Those who go to a protest to help, document, or observe should not become targets. But in Kenya, they repeatedly do. Medics treating the wounded have been teargassed and shot at. Journalists covering protests have been arrested, beaten, and had their equipment confiscated. Civil society workers monitoring human rights have been detained and intimidated.
During the June 2024 Finance Bill protests, a medical doctor wearing identifiable clothing was shot in the chest with a kinetic impact projectile while treating the wounded. Despite medics wearing clearly marked vests, police fired teargas directly at medical camps that were treating hundreds of people, including police officers themselves.
Journalists fared no better. AFP journalist Collins Olunga was hospitalised after a teargas canister was thrown at him by police. The Standard's Jutus Mwangi was bundled into a police vehicle and thrown off the moving vehicle. NTV cameraperson Maureen Muthoni injured and arrested.
Targeting helpers is not incidental. It is strategic. When medics cannot work, the injured suffer longer. When journalists cannot report, accountability is harder to establish. When civil society cannot monitor, abuses go unrecorded. Each attack on a helper is an attack on the infrastructure of accountability itself.
What Were the Total Number of Arrests? (2020-2025)
For four years, protest-related arrests in Kenya stayed low. The two largest figures in the dataset arriving back to back came in 2024 and 2025 at 858 and 1,128 respectively.
Arrest is a quieter form of force than a bullet. It does not generate the same images or the same immediate outrage. But it carries the same intent and that is to clear the streets, break momentum, and send a message to everyone watching that showing up has consequences. 1,128 arrests in a single year is not law enforcement. It is the systematic use of detention as a tool of suppression applied against people exercising a right the Constitution guarantees them under Article 37. When this data is read alongside the increasing number of deaths and injuries in the same period, the picture is complete. The state did not choose between force and detention. It deployed both.
Which Protesters are Most Likely to be Arrested?
The data on who gets arrested reveals a pattern that is anything but random with arrests clustered around specific groups. Young people, opposition-linked protesters, and those demonstrating on governance and accountability issues are disproportionately represented in arrest figures.
This reflects targeted policing decisions. When the state chooses who to arrest at a protest, it is making a political choice by deciding whose voice is tolerable and whose is not.
What were the Weapons Used by Police? (2020-2025)
The pattern of weapons used by police over the period from 2020 to 2025 tells a story about the state's default posture toward dissent. Teargas is the most consistently deployed tool. Live ammunition appears with a frequency that exceeds what any proportionality standard should permit. Batons and physical force are used routinely, often in situations where the protest itself had been peaceful.
The data matters because weapons choices have consequences. Teargas used in enclosed spaces, or fired at close range, causes serious injury. Live rounds kill people. Water cannons at full pressure break bones. Every weapon deployed at a protest is a decision by an officer, authorised by a command structure.
Who are Weapons Being Used on?
The data on weapons deployment is not evenly distributed across protest types. It targeted Governance protests, Gen Z-led actions, and opposition demonstrations led by politicians that attract the heaviest weaponised responses. Community and labour protests receive a different treatment in many cases, though not always.
That unevenness is itself a finding. The right to protest should not vary by what you are protesting about. Sadly the data shows that in Kenya, it does.
What were the Teargas Incidents Per Protest by County?
Among the 10 counties with the highest number of teargas-use instances, Makueni records the highest rate of teargas use at 55.6%, followed by Kisumu at 43.2% and Kisii at 31.0%.
There is a clear pattern, the counties experiencing the highest number of protests are also the same counties where teargas is most heavily deployed, particularly in urban areas. They reflect policing decisions, command cultures, and local accountability structures that vary county by county. The right to protest in Kenya does not carry the same risk everywhere. Where you live determines how likely you are to be met with gas.
What Protests Trigger the Use of Firearms the Most?
Live ammunition is the most extreme tool in the state's crowd control arsenal. Its use should be exceptional, precisely governed, and only ever deployed to protect life from an imminent lethal threat. The data suggests it has been used in Kenya in circumstances that fall well outside that standard.
The protests most likely to trigger Firearm use are those that touch on economic grievances as opposed to those that are targeting the state's own conduct such as governance failures, police brutality, and political accountability
Deaths vs Arrest vs Injuries (2020-2025)
What we see across six years is a state learning how to suppress. Slowly at first, cautious, measured and contained. Then, from 2024 onwards, all restraint is gone. Deaths, injuries, and arrests rose together, in the same years, against the same people, in response to the same act that is citizens exercising a constitutional right. This tells a story about a government that chose, consistently and at scale, to meet its people's demands with force rather than with answers. And the most devastating detail is not the peak. It is that the peak may continue to rise.
How was this data collected?
The information referenced in this report was obtained through a systematic mapping of protest events as reported by state, civic, and news media agencies. Among them were the Interior Ministry, Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority, members of the Police Reforms Working Group, ACLED, and Kenyan and international media houses, among others.
The search was guided by our working definition of a protest provided within Article 37 of the constitution that states "Every person has the right, peaceably and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket, and to present petitions to public authorities." To ensure consistency and traceability, data was gathered month by month using advanced online search terms used were "protest" and "demonstration" because these appeared most consistently across news reporting on civic actions, public gatherings, and organised expressions of discontent.
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.
Protests were organised into categories based on the issues, groups, or grievances reported in the news stories. Some protest groups overlapped in membership, themes, or organising bodies. In such cases, the dataset prioritises accurate representation of each protest as reported, rather than enforcing rigid group boundaries.
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