Mali 🇲🇱

Filed under Africa and more precisely Western Africa, Mali is a sovereign state. The long form of the name is Republic of Mali. The capital is Bamako.

Some 24.5 million people call it home, placing it 58th of 249 by population — between Syria above it and Burkina Faso below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 2nd of 17 in size and 5th in population.

Its territory runs to 1,240,192 km², which ranks it 25th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Angola and just ahead of South Africa. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Angola.

Mali 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: Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Guinea and Mauritania 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 Mali's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Mali's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Mali's borders, Burkina Faso 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:

• 🇩🇿 Algeria
• 🇨🇮 Ivory Coast
• 🇸🇳 Senegal
• 🇬🇳 Guinea
• 🇲🇷 Mauritania

The coordinates the dataset gives are 17.0° N, 4.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,892 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The prime meridian also passes close to it, so it straddles the line that divides east from west. Yemen, Thailand and Vietnam sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

7 countries share a land border with it: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. The largest of them by area is Algeria, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 167.8 million people.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, and it means every shipment in or out has to cross someone else's border first. 2 of its neighbours, Burkina Faso and Niger, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 20 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

The one official language is French. French is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 45 other entries including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

People from Mali are called Malians.

Inside Africa it places 19th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 5.4% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Mali sits 5th of 17 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Niger just above and Burkina Faso 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.

• 🇳🇪 Niger
• 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

It uses the West African CFA franc (Fr, XOF). That is a shared currency: 7 other entries use it, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast and Niger.

The top-level domain is .ml. The international dialling code is +223. Its ISO codes are ml and MLI, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Bamako is the city to remember for this country.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Mali 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, Mali 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.