Lake Victoria

Lake Victoria is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer John Hanning Speke, the first Briton to document it. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River.With a surface area of approximately 68800km2, Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropical lake, and the world's second largest fresh water lake by surface area, after Lake Superior in North America. In terms of volume, Lake Victoria is the world's ninth largest continental lake, containing about 2750km3 of water.Lake Victoria receives its water primarily from direct rainfall and thousands of small streams. The Kagera River is the largest river flowing into this lake, with its mouth on the lake's western shore. Lake Victoria is drained solely by the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, on the lake's northern shore.Lake Victoria occupies a shallow depression in Africa. The lake has a maximum depth of 84m and an average depth of 40m. Its catchment area covers 184000km2. The lake has a shoreline of 7142km when digitized at the 1:25,000 level, with islands constituting 3.7 percent of this length, and is divided among three countries: Kenya (6 percent or 4,100km2), Uganda (45 percent or 31,000km2), and Tanzania (49 percent or 33,700km2).