Kenya is home to people of many different ethnic origins. About two-thirds speak Bantu languages, and are mostly from three ethnic groups – Kikuyu, Luhya, and Kamba.

Other peoples include the Kalenjin, Luo, Maasai, Turkana, and, on the coast, the Mijikenda. Most people in the north-east of Kenya are Cushitic speakers; they make up less than three per cent of the population, but live in one third of the country. Kenyan Asians and Arabs make up only a small proportion of the population, but they have a lot of commercial power.

Seventy per cent of the population are Christian, 19 per cent are animist, and six per cent are Muslim.

Most people live by farming or, in drier areas, by herding livestock. Other people work in Kenya’s industries, some of which are the most developed in East Africa: milling maize and wheat flour, spinning and weaving cotton, making household goods, refining cane sugar, and brewing beer. In towns, increasing numbers of Kenyans work in small businesses (as metal-workers or market traders, for instance). This is known as jua kali, or the "hot sun", under which they work.