Ivory Coast 🇨🇮

Ivory Coast is a sovereign country in Western Africa, in the wider region of Africa. Its full official name is Republic of Côte d'Ivoire. Government sits in Yamoussoukro.

The population is about 31.9 million, placing it 50th of 249 by population — between Madagascar above it and Nepal below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 5th of 17 in size and 3rd in population.

It covers 322,463 km², which ranks it 71st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Norway and just ahead of Poland. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Norway.

Its reference point sits at 8.0° north and 5.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 891 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.

Its land neighbours number 5: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia and Mali. The largest of them by area is Mali, while the most populous is Ghana. Together those neighbours hold about 102.8 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 99 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.

Officially it is monolingual: French. Another 45 entries list French too — among them Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

Someone from Ivory Coast is an Ivorian.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 16th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 7.0% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Ivory Coast sits 3rd of 17 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Ghana just above and Niger 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.

• 🇬🇭 Ghana
• 🇳🇪 Niger
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Ivory Coast 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, Ivory Coast 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Ivory Coast ranks 71st of 249 by area and 50th by population. That works out at 0.22% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.39% 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 Ivory Coast in the size ordering are Norway at 323,802 km² and Poland at 312,679 km², against Ivory Coast's 322,463 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Ivory Coast averages 99 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 116th 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.

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

If a quiz asks for the capital of Ivory Coast, the answer is Yamoussoukro.

Websites there use the .ci domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +225. Standard country codes: ci and CIV.

Ivory Coast 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.