Kenya Has No Femicide Count — and Two Tallies That Don't Agree

125 is the closest thing Kenya has to an official femicide number, and it proves how little is officially known. On May 23, 2026, the National Police Service said 125 femicide cases had been recorded nationwide, while raising the alarm over rising sexual and gender-based violence ⁸. For a country confronting what its own presidential task force called a national crisis, that figure is both stark and thin: a single police tally standing in for a system that does not exist ⁶.

Kenya, as of the research file, has no central count of women killed because they are women. A presidentially appointed Technical Working Group found the country “lacks a centralised, disaggregated and publicly accessible national data system on gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide,” a gap it said was undermining prevention, accountability and policy response ². As of December 2025, femicide was not officially recognised in Kenya despite rising cases, with many cases said to remain unreported or misclassified ⁵.

Without that system, even the basic question — how many women have been killed — produces answers that do not agree. One outlet, reporting task-force-linked findings, put the toll at 1,639 women killed, with women aged 30 to 44 most affected and a 10% rise in reported killings ³. Another count put the toll at at least 1,069 women killed between 2016 and 2025, compiled from media reports and court records and released Thursday, February 12, 2026 ⁴. The sources do not reconcile the difference, and the memo is explicit that these are different counts from different methodologies ^{3 4}.

That disagreement is not an academic footnote. It is the direct product of counting without a state database, where journalists, advocates and court clerks assemble the dead from press clippings while the state has no single, public, disaggregated ledger ^{2 4}. When two serious efforts can be separated by hundreds of names, policy is left to argue over scale instead of acting on causes, and families are left to wonder whether a killing was recorded at all ².

The task force meant to break that pattern was led by former Deputy Chief Justice Dr. Nancy Baraza and its report was received by President William Ruto around late January 2026 ⁶. It described the situation as a national crisis, found there was no standalone femicide law, noted a 10% rise in reported killings, and proposed legal reforms alongside a Sh50 billion fund ⁶. In other words, the state’s own appointees confirmed the two central facts at once: the violence was escalating and the law had no name for its most extreme form ^{6 5}.

What followed the report was activity without resolution. Police said investigative capacity had been strengthened and a specialised team was established at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to handle femicide ^{8 9}. A separate account added that 128 femicide cases reached the courts in 2025, a figure that sits uneasily beside the 125 cases cited nationally in May and underlines again why a single, transparent methodology matters ^{9 8}.

Public patience wore visibly thin in June. On June 1, 2026, thousands marched in Nairobi demanding the government declare femicide a national crisis, with advocacy groups giving the government 40 days to act ⁷. A day later, on June 2, 2026, Kenya unveiled a digital tool for tackling GBV and femicide amid rising cases ¹⁰. A march and an app, days apart, captured the moment: grief in the streets, technology from the state, and still no shared count of the dead ^{7 10 2}.

Five months after the task force report — around late June 2026 — survivors and advocates said the report still awaits implementation ¹¹. The report itself had been received around late January 2026 ⁶. That five-month gap is now the central political fact, longer than the 40-day ultimatum issued in the streets and more consequential than any single unveiling, because it connects a documented crisis to an undelivered plan ^{11 7}.

The honest position is that Kenya knows enough to act and too little to measure action. It knows femicide has no standalone legal status, that police can name more than a hundred recent cases, that courts saw more than a hundred last year, and that independent tallies diverge by hundreds over a decade ^{5 8 9 3 4}. What it cannot say — because it has built no system to say it — is whether things are getting better or worse this month, where, and for whom ².