Kenya has made real progress in curbing tobacco use, but the numbers hide an uneven story. National success is being carried almost entirely by women, who have largely abandoned the habit, while men’s tobacco use continues largely unchecked. That gender gap, a new World Health Organization (WHO) report shows, is not unique to Kenya. It plays out in the same way across the African region and, ultimately, across the world, where falling percentages mask population growth quietly driving up the actual number of tobacco users. 

The pattern is stark. Africa, like Kenya, is meeting its reduction targets on paper. Yet demographic growth across the continent is outpacing the decline in prevalence, meaning more people are smoking today than a decade ago, even as the share of the population doing so falls. The same dynamic is unfolding globally, where a new generation of nicotine products, e-cigarettes in particular, is reaching teenagers faster than it is reaching adults, raising fresh questions about whether hard-won gains can be sustained. 

The WHO has ranked Kenya 136th of 166 countries assessed for tobacco use, with 9.6 per cent of adults aged 15 and above using tobacco in 2024, roughly half the global average of 19.5 per cent.  

Kenya has achieved a 37 per cent relative reduction since 2010, comfortably ahead of the 30 per cent target set for 2025, and is formally classified as on track. Yet male prevalence stands at 16.8 per cent against just 2.4 per cent for women, meaning Kenya’s strong overall numbers are being carried almost entirely by women who have largely stopped smoking, while men’s use has fallen far more slowly.   

Kenya, European smoke tobacco, South-East Asia countries chew it 

Smoking prevalence in Kenya sits at 7.3 per cent, with cigarette use specifically at 6.4 per cent, showing that smoked tobacco, rather than smokeless products, dominates the market. This places Kenya closer to the profile of European or Western Pacific countries, where nearly all tobacco use is smoked, than to South-East Asia, where chewed and oral products account for a large share of use.  

Within Africa, Kenya’s 9.6 per cent is markedly higher than several West and Horn of Africa countries, including Nigeria at 3.1 per cent, the lowest of any country assessed worldwide, Ghana at 3.3 per cent, Liberia and Ethiopia both at 5.2 per cent, Senegal at 5.4 per cent and Cameroon at 5.7 per cent. 

The same gender pattern seen in Kenya holds, and widens, at the regional and global level. Across the WHO African Region, male prevalence sits at roughly 18 per cent against four per cent for women, an even starker divide than Kenya’s own figures. 

 Globally, male prevalence fell from 49.8 per cent in 2000 to 32.5 per cent in 2024, a 35 per cent reduction, while female prevalence fell far faster, from 16.5 per cent to 6.6 per cent, a 60 per cent reduction that saw women hit the global 30 per cent target back in 2020, five years early. The result is a global male-to-female ratio that has widened from roughly 3:1 in 2000 to 5:1 in 2024. 

Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia on track to meet 30% tobacco reduction target 

Kenya sits within the WHO African Region, which the report treats as a single bloc stretching from West to Southern Africa. The region began the period with the lowest tobacco prevalence of any WHO region, around 18 per cent in 2000, and has declined steadily since, falling towards roughly 13 per cent by 2024, with the same gentle downward trajectory projected to continue to 2030.  

However, population growth across Africa is outpacing the rate of decline in prevalence, meaning the actual count of tobacco users on the continent is still rising even as the share of the population using tobacco falls. The report estimates roughly six million more tobacco users in Africa between 2010 and 2025, despite the declining rate.  

Africa is nonetheless one of three regions, alongside the Americas and South-East Asia, formally on track to meet the 30 per cent relative reduction target, showing this is not a region falling behind on policy, but one where demographic growth is quietly eating into the gains tobacco control is delivering. 

A similar dynamic plays out in the Eastern Mediterranean region, where 15 million more users are projected over the same period despite a declining rate, mirroring Africa’s pattern almost exactly. Both regions illustrate the same structural point: in fast-growing populations, a falling percentage and a growing absolute burden can be true at the same time, a distinction easily lost when only the headline prevalence rate is reported. 

Pulled out to the global total, adult tobacco use has fallen below 20 per cent for the first time on record, from 33.1 per cent in 2000 to 19.5 per cent in 2024, projected to reach 17.4 per cent by 2030, a 41 per cent reduction since the turn of the century. Some 1.20 billion people aged 15 and above still use tobacco, 83 per cent of them men.   

South-East Asia accounts for over 50% of the120 million decline in tobacco users  

The global relative reduction against the 2010 baseline stands at 27 per cent, just short of the 30 per cent target, and at the current pace the WHO estimates the target will not be reached until around 2028, three years late. Sixty-one countries are now on track, five more than at the last report, but 12 countries are recording rising prevalence and 11 others that had been improving have stalled or reversed, three of them after previously being classified as on track. 

Regional performance varies widely. South-East Asia began the period far higher than any other region, above 50 per cent in 2000, and has recorded the steepest decline of any region, falling to the low 20s by 2024. The region met its 30 per cent target as early as 2021 and now accounts for more than half the world’s projected 120 million net decline in tobacco users by 2025. Europe declined from around 37 per cent to the low 20s, though a large share of its countries register as declining without reaching the 30 per cent threshold.  

The Western Pacific region has fared worst of all: prevalence there has fallen only 12 per cent since 2010, the slowest reduction of any region, with the absolute number of users essentially flat between 2010 and 2025, and male prevalence there may still sit at 43 per cent in 2025, among the highest of any region for either sex. Only two WHO regions are currently on track to cut male prevalence by 30 per cent. 

Globally, cigarettes remain the dominant product, with 847 million of the 1.20 billion tobacco users smoking cigarettes specifically and 992 million smoking any product. Smokeless tobacco adds a further 359 million users, 80 per cent of them concentrated in South-East Asia, where the gap between “any tobacco” and “smoked tobacco” prevalence is the widest of any region. 

The most urgent thread running through the global data concerns young people. An estimated 40 million adolescents aged 13 to 15 already use tobacco, about one in ten worldwide. While adult e-cigarette use remains low and concentrated in high-income countries, 14.7 million adolescents now vape, and in countries where survey data allows a direct comparison, adolescents use e-cigarettes at roughly nine times the adult rate. 

New generation nicotine products courted by teenagers faster than adults 

 This figure, more than any other in the report, signals where the tobacco and nicotine industry is rebuilding the customer base it loses to quitting, disease and death. 

Read together, from Kenya outward to the rest of the world, the numbers tell a consistent story at every scale. Progress is real, but uneven, carried disproportionately by falling female use while male prevalence lags everywhere from Nairobi to the Western Pacific.  

That progress is now being tested by a new generation of nicotine products finding their way to teenagers faster than to adults. Kenya’s own record, a strong national result built on an unresolved gender divide, turns out to be less an exception than a small-scale preview of the global pattern. 

Source: WHO 

Data visualisation: Stanley Njihia 

Text: Yvonne Kawira