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Kenya does not write the county on its number plates, so the name you get in a round comes off a sign: a county government's logo on a health centre, a welcome board at a boundary, a distance sign to the next town. That leaves one question, and it is the hard half: where is that county? This page is all 47 of them, grouped the way Kenyans still group them, and the game asks you to put each name on the map.
Kenya has been run by 47 counties since March 2013, and by very little else at the local level. The 2010 constitution abolished the eight provinces and handed the counties a governor, an assembly, a budget and a long list of devolved functions: health, roads below the trunk network, agriculture, water, markets. That is why the names are worth learning. Devolution put each county's name and crest on the things a camera sees, which the provinces never did: dispensaries, water tanks, cattle dips, market sheds, boda boda stages, county road works signs and the welcome board at every boundary.
The counties are not new lines on the map. The constitution's First Schedule defined them as the districts as they stood in 1992, which is why the shapes look older than the institution and why so many of them are still called after the district town at their centre. What changed in 2013 was which of those units mattered.
The plate is not the clue here, and it is worth saying because it is in Kenya's neighbourhood of the map. A Kenyan plate is white at the front and yellow at the back with a three letter, three digit, one letter registration, and the letters run in national sequence rather than by county: a KDA car is a car registered when the KDA series was current, not a car from anywhere in particular. The county name has to come from something else.
What it usually comes from is a town. Kenyan road signs are in English and give you the next town and the distance to it, and most counties are named after theirs. That shortcut breaks in exactly the places you are most likely to recognise, which is what the section below is for.
The traps here are almost all names, and there are three kinds.
Towns that are not their county's namesake. Eldoret is in Uasin Gishu, Kitale is in Trans Nzoia, Iten is in Elgeyo-Marakwet, Kapsabet is in Nandi, Voi is in Taita Taveta, Thika is in Kiambu and Naivasha is in Nakuru. Each of those towns is better known than the county that holds it, so a sign pointing at one is only useful if you know the pairing.
Names that start the same way. Nyeri, Nyandarua and Nyamira are three different counties, and Nyanza is a province rather than a county at all. Kisii and Kisumu are neighbours in the same corner. Kilifi and Kwale are both on the coast and sit either side of Mombasa. Marsabit and Migori are at opposite ends of the country.
Names that are something else first. Turkana is a lake, a people and the second largest county. Lamu is an island, an archipelago and a county. Mombasa is an island, a city and the smallest county on the map.
Those are the eight provinces Kenya was divided into from independence until 2013, and they have no legal existence now. They have everything else. Kenyans place each other by them, weather bulletins and election coverage are read out by them, and the regional coordinators the national government still posts around the country work to roughly the same map. Each can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog, which makes North Eastern a three county drill and Central a five.
Two of the eight need a note. Rift Valley is not a region so much as a third of the country: fourteen counties, from Turkana on the South Sudan border to Kajiado on the Tanzanian one, holding both the driest and some of the wettest land in Kenya. If one province is worth drilling on its own, it is this one. Nairobi was a province of exactly one district and is now a county of exactly one county, which is why it is a single name in the list. The city has been administered apart from the districts around it since the colonial period, and it is the only place on this map where the county boundary is a city boundary.
Mombasa: an island, the bridges and causeways onto it, and not much else. It is the smallest county in Kenya by a wide margin, well under half the size of the next smallest, and it is the one target here you are more likely to miss by tapping than by not knowing. Zoom in before you tap. Everything around it, north and south along the same coast, is Kilifi or Kwale.
Nairobi: the capital, its own county, and its own province before that. On the map it is the small block in the south centre, wrapped by Kiambu to the north and west, with Machakos to the east and Kajiado to the south. It is worth knowing as a landmark rather than as an answer, because every county in the crowded middle of this map is easier to place once you have found it.
Turkana: the second largest county in Kenya after Marsabit next door, in the far north west, along the west shore of the lake of the same name and up to the South Sudan and Uganda borders. Hot, low, arid and thinly settled, with a landscape nothing like the highlands a hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. It is the county on this map most easily named from its outline alone, which makes it a useful anchor for the north.
47. They were created by the 2010 constitution and became the unit of local government after the March 2013 election, replacing the eight provinces and the districts under them. The number has not changed since, and the constitution's First Schedule fixed each county's boundary as that of the district as it stood in 1992.
Central, Coast, Eastern, Nairobi, North Eastern, Nyanza, Rift Valley and Western. They ran from independence until 2013 and were abolished with devolution, but they are still how the country is described in conversation, in weather bulletins and in election coverage. Every county sits inside exactly one of them, because the counties were built out of the districts the provinces contained, and this game lets you drill one province at a time.
No. A Kenyan civilian plate is white at the front and yellow at the back, with a registration of three letters, three digits and a final letter. The letter series runs in national sequence and records roughly when a vehicle was registered rather than where, so a plate will not place you. Government vehicles carry a GK prefix on a red plate, which tells you it is a state vehicle and nothing about the county.
Read the signage. Since devolution the county government's name and crest appear on health centres, water points, market buildings, boda boda stages and road works, and a boundary is usually marked by a welcome sign naming the county you are entering. Failing that, use the next town on a road sign: most counties are named after their main town, though a good number of the best known towns are not, Eldoret in Uasin Gishu and Kitale in Trans Nzoia among them.
Nyeri, Nyandarua and Nyamira, which start the same way and are not neighbours: the first two are in the old Central province and the third is by Lake Victoria. Kisii and Kisumu, which are near each other and sound alike. Kilifi and Kwale, which sit north and south of Mombasa on the same coast. And Marsabit with Migori, which are about as far apart as two Kenyan counties can be.
Marsabit, in the arid north, is the largest by area, with Turkana beside it a close second, and Mombasa on the coast is the smallest by a wide margin. By population the order is different again: Nairobi is by far the most populous and Lamu the least, which is worth knowing because population is what decides how much of a county you will ever see from a road.
The other African trainers here are Nigeria States, South Africa Provinces and South Africa Dialing Codes. For administrative maps of a similar size, try Philippines Provinces, Turkey Provinces and Spain Provinces.
