knbs data: The National Treasury ke.knbs.government-debt.annual annual

National Government Outstanding Debt by Source.

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VERSION v2026-08-19

UPDATED 18d ago

CHECKED 1d ago

COVERAGE 2019 - 2024

SHAPE 180 × 8

SIZE 7.0 KB

FREQUENCY annual

PIPELINE automated

LICENSE Not stated

SOURCE www.knbs.or.ke

What Kenya's national government owed at the end of each June, and to whom, for the six years to 2024. 180 observations across ten bilateral lenders, five multilateral institutions, commercial banks, the international sovereign bond, suppliers' credit and internal debt.

Total debt nearly doubled over the period, from 5.14 trillion shillings to 9.96 trillion. The composition changed more than the size. Multilateral lending tripled, from 910 billion to 2.79 trillion, while commercial bank debt fell from 395 billion to 323. Kenya's exposure to the IMF rose more than eightfold, from 49 billion to 421.

China remains by far the largest single bilateral lender at 738 billion shillings in 2024, more than seven times France, the next largest, but grew only 12 per cent over the period against IDA and IFAD's 159 per cent.

External debt was 55.7 per cent of the total in 2019 and 50.9 per cent in 2024.

**The two subtotals do not add to the grand total, and this is not an error.** TOTAL EXTERNAL plus TOTAL INTERNAL exceeds TOTAL DEBT by exactly the IMF funds on-lent to Government: 40,741 million shillings in 2022 and 95,516 in 2023, and nothing in the four years the row is blank. That money is owed to the IMF and owed by Government to the Central Bank, so KNBS counts it in both and nets it out once. Adding the two subtotals overstates Kenya's debt by 95.5 billion shillings in 2023 and gives a figure that looks entirely reasonable.

One row is negative and belongs that way. Government deposits at the Central Bank and on-lending net off internal debt, running between −418 billion and −556 billion shillings, and are part of the printed internal total.

Three row labels carry typographic errors the source prints: "Total (billateral)", "Total(multilateral)" with no space, and "MEMORADUM". They are published as printed, because a row label is what the source says it is.

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WHO KENYA OWES

Kenya's multilateral debt tripled between 2019 and 2024 while what it owed commercial banks fell, the only creditor block that shrank.

National government debt outstanding at 30 June, by creditor block · KSh million · 2019 against 2024

SOURCE: The National Treasury · via Kenya National Bureau of Statistics · National Government Outstanding Debt by Source (annual) · Updated 2026-08-19

#	year	period_start	creditor	section	debt_level	status	value	unit
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COLUMN	TYPE	DESCRIPTION	UNIT
year	int64	Calendar year; the debt is outstanding as at 30 June	-
period_start	date	30 June of the year	-
creditor	string	The lender, institution or instrument, as the source prints it, including its typographic errors	-
section	string	Lending Countries, International Organisations, INTERNAL DEBT or MEMORADUM; null for the rows that sit directly under TOTAL EXTERNAL with no header of their own	-
debt_level	string	creditor, subtotal, total or memorandum. Summing across levels double counts, and note that the two subtotals deliberately do not add to the total: see the description.	-
status	string	final or provisional	-
value	float64	Debt outstanding in millions of shillings, negative for the government-deposits row, null where the source prints no figure	-
unit	string	ksh_million	-

CITATION · APA 7

imibare contributors. (2026). National Government Outstanding Debt by Source [Data set]. imibare. v2026-08-19. https://imibare.org/datasets/ke.knbs.government-debt.annual