Chad 🇹🇩

Chad is a sovereign country in Middle Africa, in the wider region of Africa. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Chad. Its seat of government is N'Djamena.

The population is about 20.3 million, placing it 65th of 249 by population — between Kazakhstan above it and Chile below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 2nd of 10 in size and 4th in population.

The land area is 1,284,000 km², which ranks it 22nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Peru and just ahead of Niger. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Peru.

Chad has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: Nigeria, Sudan, Cameroon and Libya have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Chad's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Chad's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Chad's borders, the Central African Republic and Niger are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇳🇬 Nigeria
• 🇸🇩 Sudan
• 🇨🇲 Cameroon
• 🇱🇾 Libya

Its reference point sits at 15.0° north and 19.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,670 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Its land neighbours number 6: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Libya, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan. The largest of them by area is Sudan, while the most populous is Nigeria. Together those neighbours hold about 352.0 million people.

Chad is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, so all seaborne trade runs through a neighbour's ports. 2 of its neighbours, the Central African Republic and Niger, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Spread across 1,284,000 km², that works out at about 16 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Arabic and French. Arabic, the first listed, is shared with 24 other entries worldwide.

Someone from Chad is a Chadian.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 23rd most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 9.0% of everyone living in Middle Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Middle Africa and Chad sits 4th of 10 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Cameroon just above and South Sudan just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇲 Cameroon
• 🇸🇸 South Sudan
• 🇨🇩 DR Congo

Money there is the Central African CFA franc (Fr, XAF). It shares that currency with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

Websites there use the .td domain. The international dialling code is +235. Standard country codes: td and TCD.

N'Djamena is the city to remember for this country.

Chad is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Chad does not have the Central African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 6 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XAF, 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 XAF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Chad 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.