Impact of the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis in Kenya

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis which begun in the United States had severe effects on the economy. It lead to collapse of major banks and large financial institutions. The effects spread rapidly to other developed economies and emerging markets due to contagion. However, there were hardly reports of adverse effects on African economies. This paper seeks to empirically establish whether Kenya was adversely affected by the crisis. It uses financial stress index to measure the stress level in the financial sector and ordinary least square regression to assess the behavior of gross domestic product in the real economy.