knbs ke.knbs.export-quantities.annual annual

Quantities of Principal Domestic Export Commodities.

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VERSION v2026-08-25

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COVERAGE 2015 - 2024

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FREQUENCY annual

PIPELINE automated

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SOURCE www.knbs.or.ke

How much Kenya ships of each principal export commodity, by volume rather than by value, for the ten years to 2024. 340 observations across 34 commodities in four sections.

Kenya shipped half as much tea again in 2024 as in 2015, 626,579 tonnes against 420,527, a rise of 49.0 per cent, while tea's share of export earnings fell from 24.6 per cent to 20.3 over the same years. More leaving the country, less of the income coming from it. Coffee tells a milder version of the same story, 22.8 per cent more tonnage.

Potatoes are the fastest-growing line here by a distance: 5,306 tonnes in 2015 and 119,280 in 2024, more than twenty-two times over. Eggs rose thirteenfold, from 48 tonnes to 651. Meat and meat preparations, hides and skins, and metal containers each roughly quadrupled, and animal feeding stuffs went from 84,992 tonnes to 316,474.

Three commodities have stopped moving altogether. Fluorspar shipped 70,096 tonnes in 2015 and nothing at all since 2017, when Kenya's only mine suspended operations. Wattle bark extract has been at or near zero since 2021 and pyrethrum extract reported nothing in 2024 after a brief recovery in 2022 and 2023.

Read this alongside the value tables in the same chapter rather than instead of them: a commodity can ship more tonnes for less money, and tea is the clearest case in this decade.

Two cautions the source itself raises. It notes that goods whose unit quantities differ are left out of this table entirely, so it is not a complete account of what Kenya exports and does not reconcile commodity-for-commodity against the value tables. And the units are not uniform: seven appear across the 34 commodities, from tonnes to grams to millions of litres, so nothing here may be summed without checking the unit column first.

One row is not credible and is published as printed. Live animals chiefly for food is measured in numbers of animals and reads 746,294,252,072 for 2024, against 21,600,722 in 2023 and 1,340,840,209 in 2015. Kenya's entire livestock population is on the order of 80 million, so the whole row is suspect rather than any single year of it. The dataset carries what the source prints.

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MORE TEA, LESS INCOME

Kenya shipped half as much tea again in 2024 as in 2015, and earned a smaller share of its export income from it.

Tea shipped and tea's share of export earnings, both indexed to 2015 = 100 · 2015 to 2024

SOURCE: Kenya National Bureau of Statistics · Quantities of Principal Domestic Export Commodities (annual) · Updated 2026-08-25

#	year	period_start	group	commodity	value	unit	status
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COLUMN	TYPE	DESCRIPTION	UNIT
year	int64	Calendar year the goods were shipped in	-
period_start	date	First day of that calendar year	-
group	string	The section the commodity sits in, one of four the source prints in bold	-
commodity	string	The commodity, with any footnote digit removed from its name	-
value	float64	The quantity shipped, in the unit beside it	-
unit	string	One of seven the source states: Tonnes, '000 Tonnes, No., '000cu.m., Mn litres, '000 pairs or Gm. Never assume it, and never sum across it	-
status	string	final, or provisional for a year the source marks with an asterisk	-

CITATION · APA 7

imibare contributors. (2026). Quantities of Principal Domestic Export Commodities [Data set]. imibare. v2026-08-25. https://imibare.org/datasets/ke.knbs.export-quantities.annual