Geography

Kenya has a land area of 582,650 km2 and an estimated population of 32 million. It borders Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia and has a coastline of 536 km along the Indian Ocean. The climate varies from warm and humid along the coast and in the Lake Victoria basin, cool and humid in the central highlands and hot and dry in the north and east. The terrain has low plains rising to the central highlands bisected by the Great Rift Valley which runs the length of the country from Lake Turkana in the north to Lake Natron on the southern border with Tanzania. In the west, the land drops to the Nyanza plateau which surrounds the Kenyan sector of Lake Victoria. The land elevation is from sea level to the highest point Mount Kenya at 5,199 m, the second highest peak in Africa. Kenya’s vegetation is as diverse as its climate and topography would suggest and includes alpine moorland, grasslands, montane forests, coastal forest, thorn bushland and woodland, semi-desert, wetlands and mangrove swamps. The official languages are English and Kiswahili.

More details can be found at CIA Factbook.