Kenya scored 52 out of 100 in a new global internet freedom ranking published by Cloudwards on 21st March 2026, placing it alongside the United Kingdom, Brazil, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, and Zambia. That is not a comfortable grouping for a country that has long positioned itself as East Africa’s digital leader.
The study, titled “Mapped: Internet Freedom by Country in 2026,” ranked 171 countries on a 0-to-100 scale using data from OONI Explorer, Freedom House, government notices, court rulings, and regulatory disclosures. It assessed four categories: whether torrent sites are accessible, whether adult content is restricted or banned, whether political and civic expression online is free, and whether VPN services are legal and available.
A score of 52 puts Kenya squarely in the mid-table of global internet freedom. Not catastrophic. But not good either, and critically, not improving.
What the study actually measured
It is important to understand what this ranking is and what it is not. Cloudwards built its own scoring methodology. It is not the same as Freedom House’s annual “Freedom on the Net” report, although Cloudwards used Freedom House data as one of its inputs.
Freedom House’s most recent assessment, published in November 2025, gave Kenya a score of 58 out of 100, down from 64 the previous year. That six-point drop was the single largest decline of any country assessed globally in 2025, driven primarily by the internet shutdown during the #RejectFinanceBill protests in June 2024, the blocking of Telegram, arrests and disappearances of online activists, and ongoing surveillance concerns.
Cloudwards’ score of 52 for Kenya is lower than Freedom House’s 58, because the methodologies differ. Cloudwards weights categories like torrent site access and adult content access equally alongside political expression and VPN legality, while Freedom House uses 21 indicators across three broader categories (obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights). Neither score is wrong. They are measuring slightly different things. But both tell the same story: Kenya’s internet freedom is middling and getting worse.
The Kenya-UK comparison is real, but the reasons are different
The headline comparison, Kenya and the UK sharing a score of 52, is striking but requires context.
The UK loses points for reasons that look very different from Kenya’s. Britain’s Online Safety Act, which began enforcement in late 2024, requires platforms to remove illegal and harmful content and has introduced age verification requirements that restrict how adults access certain categories of online material. In January 2025, the Home Office reportedly ordered Apple to create a technical backdoor for encrypted data, leading Apple to withdraw its end-to-end encryption feature for UK iCloud users. Over 12,000 people were arrested in 2023 under communications laws, including for social media posts, according to Freedom of Information data published by The Times. And false information circulating online contributed to far-right riots across more than two dozen British cities in August 2024.
Kenya’s score, on the other hand, reflects a different set of problems. The country experienced its first confirmed internet shutdown in June 2024, lasting approximately seven hours during anti-Finance Bill protests. Telegram has been repeatedly blocked during KCSE exam periods in 2023 and 2024, with no official acknowledgement or legal justification from either the government or Safaricom. Civil society organisations have documented arrests, abductions, and disappearances of online activists and critics. And a landmark lawsuit filed by seven civil society groups in May 2025 is currently challenging the constitutionality of state-driven internet shutdowns, with the High Court granting conservatory orders against further disruptions.
Both countries score 52. One is dealing with the consequences of over-regulation and surveillance creep in a mature democracy. The other is dealing with opaque shutdowns, unexplained platform blocking, and punitive responses to political expression. The number is the same. The implications are not.
Where Africa stands
No African country reached the study’s top tier. The eleven nations that scored 92, the highest in the ranking, span four continents but Africa is not among them: Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia, Suriname, and Timor-Leste hold those spots.
Africa’s best performers are Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, and Seychelles, all on 84 points. That places them in the second tier globally, alongside countries like Canada, Switzerland, Poland, and Uruguay. It is a strong showing, even if it falls short of the very top bracket.
Below them, Africa spreads across a remarkably wide range. Benin, Gambia, Liberia, Madagascar, Namibia, and Niger scored 76. Ghana, at 72, sits alongside Italy, Mexico, and Spain. Botswana, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa landed on 64, the same tier as the United States, Japan, Australia, and France.
Then the scores drop sharply. Rwanda and Cameroon scored 56. Kenya, as noted, sits at 52 alongside Zambia. Algeria and Burkina Faso are at 48. Ethiopia scored 36. Tanzania and Libya are at 28. Uganda scored 24. And at the bottom of Africa’s range, Egypt and Sudan both scored 12 out of 100, placing them among the worst-performing nations globally.
This unevenness is the single most important takeaway from the African data. There is no single “African internet freedom” story. Cape Verde at 84 and Egypt at 12 are on the same continent but in entirely different digital realities.
The global picture
At the very bottom of the rankings, North Korea scored 0. Most of its citizens have no access to the global internet at all, restricted instead to Kwangmyong, a tightly controlled national intranet. Russia, Pakistan, Iran, and China each scored 4.
Cloudwards noted that torrenting is the most universally restricted category worldwide. No country scored “fully accessible” for torrent sites, meaning that even the highest-scoring nations impose some level of restriction on torrenting, typically through copyright enforcement rather than political censorship.
The study also highlighted that several European countries, including some with otherwise strong scores, were marked as having restrictions on political and civic online expression. Austria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, and Slovenia were all flagged under this category despite scoring 84 overall.
What this means for Kenya
For readers who have followed our reporting on this subject, none of this is surprising. We have documented the Telegram shutdowns during KCSE exams in 2023 and 2024, the $27 million economic cost of those disruptions, the civil society lawsuit that secured a High Court order against future shutdowns, the digital blackout during the June 2025 anniversary protests, and the broader question of whether smartphones and social media are Kenya’s last defence against state violence.
What the Cloudwards study adds is global context. Kenya is not an outlier. It is part of a worldwide pattern where governments, including those in democracies, are finding new ways to restrict digital access, sometimes through regulation, sometimes through infrastructure control, and sometimes through sheer opacity.
The troubling part for Kenya is the trajectory. The country went from a Freedom House score of 64 to 58 in a single year, the steepest decline globally. The Cloudwards methodology places Kenya even lower, at 52. The direction of travel is clear, and it is not upward.
What makes this particularly consequential for East Africa’s digital economy is that internet freedom is not an abstract human rights metric. It is an economic one. Every hour of total internet shutdown costs Kenya approximately KES 1.8 billion in GDP, according to NetBlocks. The repeated, unannounced Telegram disruptions during exam periods affected millions of Safaricom subscribers conducting legitimate business, not just students sharing exam papers. And the absence of transparency, no court orders, no official statements, no accountability, creates regulatory uncertainty that affects every technology company, investor, and digital entrepreneur operating in the Kenyan market.
Kenya cannot position itself as a digital economy hub while simultaneously deploying opaque internet restrictions without legal basis. Those two ambitions are incompatible, and the global data now confirms what local reporting has been saying for years.
The full Cloudwards study is available at cloudwards.net/internet-censorship.
