East Africa

About East Africa

East Africa runs from the Horn of Africa in the north — Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia — through the Great Lakes region of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, southward to the Indian Ocean coast and out to the islands of Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius and the Seychelles. South Sudan is included in the East African grouping. Fourteen countries in total span more terrain and ecological variety than any other African region.

People and languages

East Africa is geographically defined by the Great Rift Valley, the system of ancient tectonic faults that gave the region its lakes, savannas and the highland plateaus that support its largest cities. Swahili functions as a shared lingua franca across much of the mainland interior, especially in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, alongside English as the most common official language. Amharic dominates Ethiopia, Somali the Horn, and Malagasy the island of Madagascar — a reminder that East Africa is a UN-defined cluster, not a single cultural unit.

Economy

East Africa contains some of the continent's fastest-growing economies of recent years — Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda — and some of its longer-running development success stories on the islands, particularly Mauritius and the Seychelles. The East African Community (EAC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) are the two principal regional integration bodies. Services, agriculture, tourism, and an increasing role for fintech and mobile money are characteristic of the regional economy.

How to read this regional view

The cards below cover each East African country we track. For definitions of the indicators on each card, see the glossary. To explore countries on a map rather than in a list, the interactive map page lets you click any country for an instant summary.

Last reviewed: 28 April 2026. Figures on the country cards are revised when underlying source organisations publish new releases.