Benin 🇧🇯

Benin is an independent state in Western Africa, and a member of the United Nations. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Benin. Its seat of government is Porto-Novo.

It covers 112,622 km², which ranks it 102nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Eritrea and just ahead of Honduras. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a little larger than Iceland.

It is home to roughly 14.5 million people, placing it 75th of 249 by population — between Guinea above it and Rwanda below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 10th by area and 9th by population.

Its reference point sits at 9.5° north and 2.3° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,058 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Ethiopia, Venezuela and Somalia.

It borders 4 neighbours: Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Togo. The largest of them by area is Niger, while the most populous is Nigeria. Together those neighbours hold about 292.8 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 128 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Beninese, so residents are Beninese.

French is the only official language. Another 45 entries list French too — among them Belgium, Burkina Faso, Burundi and Cameroon.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 28th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 3.2% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Benin does not have the West African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 8 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XOF, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in XOF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Benin among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Benin sits 9th of 17 by population and 10th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Guinea just above and Togo just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Nigeria is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Western Africa has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇬🇳 Guinea
• 🇹🇬 Togo
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Put next to every other entry on this site, Benin ranks 102nd of 249 by area and 75th by population. That works out at 0.075% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.18% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Benin in the size ordering are Eritrea at 117,600 km² and Honduras at 112,492 km², against Benin's 112,622 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Benin averages 128 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 98th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

The currency is the West African CFA franc (Fr, XOF). Another 7 entries use the same currency — Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali and Niger among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Benin.

Its internet country code is .bj. The international dialling code is +229. In ISO terms it is bj in two letters and BEN in three.

Porto-Novo is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.