Nyanza Province in the context of "Counties of Kenya"

Kisumu (/kiːˈsuːmuː/ kee-SOO-moo) is the third-largest city in Kenya located in the Lake Victoria area in the former Nyanza Province. It is the second-largest city after Kampala in the Lake Victoria Basin. The city has a population of slightly over 600,000. The metro region, including Maseno and Ahero, has a population of 1,155,574 people (560,942 males, 594,609 females and 23 intersex) according to the 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census which was conducted by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.

Apart from being an important political city, it is one of the premier industrial and commercial centres in Kenya. It is also an intellectual city with many PhDs. The city is currently undergoing an urban rejuvenation of the downtown and lower town which includes modernizing the lake front, decongesting main streets, and making the streets pedestrian-friendly.

The Urewe culture developed and spread in and around the Lake Victoria region of Africa during the African Iron Age. The culture's earliest dated artefacts are located in the Kagera Region of Tanzania, and it extended as far west as the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as far east as the Nyanza and Western provinces of Kenya, north into Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi and south into Southern Africa. Sites from the Urewe culture date from the Early Iron Age, from the 5th century BC to the 6th century AD. The Urewe people certainly did not disappear, and the continuity of institutional life was never completely broken. One of the most striking things about the Early Iron Age pots and smelting furnaces is that some of them were discovered at sites that the local people still associate with royalty, and still more significant is the continuity oflanguage.

Rift Valley Province (Swahili: Mkoa wa Bonde la Ufa) of Kenya, bordering Uganda, was one of Kenya's eight provinces, before the 2013 Kenyan general election.Rift Valley Province was the largest and one of the most economically important provinces in Kenya. It was dominated by the Kenya Rift Valley which passes through it and gave the province its name. According to the 2009 Census, the former province covered an area of 182,505.1 square kilometres (45,098,000 acres; 70,465.6 sq mi) and would have had a population of 10,006,805, making it the largest and most populous province in the country. The bulk of the provincial population inhabited a strip between former Nairobi and Nyanza Province. The capital was the town of Nakuru.

Kenya's former provinces were replaced by a system of 47 counties in 2013, following the general elections held on March 4, 2013, which fully implemented the devolved government system outlined in the Constitution of Kenya 2010.