rKenyaCensus Package

The rKenyaCensus package contains the results of the 2109 Kenya Population Census.

rKenyaCensus Package

January 21, 2021

The rKenyaCensus package contains the results of the 2019 Kenya Population Census. The census exercise was carried out in August 2019, and the results were released in February 2020. Kenya leveraged on technology to capture data during cartographic mapping, enumeration and data transmission, making the 2019 Census the first paperless census to be conducted in Kenya. The data was published in four different pdf files (Volume 1 - Volume 4) which can be found in the Kenya National Bureau of statistics website. The data in its current form was open and accessible, but not usable and so there was need to convert it into a machine readable format. This data can be used by the government, non-governmental organizations and any other entities for data driven policy making and development. During the talk, I will explain the reasons behind development of the package, take you through the steps I took during the process and finally showcase analysis of certain aspects of the data.

Additional Videos

Shelmith Kariuki and Andrew Ba Tran and Q&A

Andrew Ba Tran, Megan Beckett, and Shelmith Kariuki Q&A


About the speaker

Shelmith Kariuki is a Senior Data Analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is an RStudio Certified Tidyverse trainer (https://education.rstudio.com/trainers/ ), currently working as a Data Analytics consultant with UN DESA. She previously worked as a Research Manager at Geopoll, and as a Data Analyst at Busara Center for Behavioral Economics. She also worked as an assistant lecturer in various Kenyan universities, teaching units in Statistics and Actuarial Science. She has extensive experience in data analysis using R. She co-organizes a community of R users in Nairobi (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/nairobir/) and in Africa (https://twitter.com/AfricaRUsers). One of the missions of her community work is to make sure that there is an increased number of R adopters, in Africa. She is very passionate about training and using data analytics to drive development projects in Africa.