Niger 🇳🇪

Niger is a sovereign country in Western Africa, in the wider region of Africa. The long form of the name is Republic of Niger. The capital is Niamey.

Its territory runs to 1,267,000 km², which ranks it 23rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Chad and just ahead of Angola. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Chad.

Some 27.0 million people call it home, placing it 55th of 249 by population — between Australia above it and North Korea below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 1st by area and 4th by population.

Niger 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, Algeria, Benin 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 Niger's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Niger's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Niger's borders, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali 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
• 🇩🇿 Algeria
• 🇧🇯 Benin
• 🇱🇾 Libya

Plotted on a globe it falls at 16.0° north, 8.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,781 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Yemen, Thailand and Vietnam — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

7 countries share a land border with it: Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, Mali and Nigeria. The largest of them by area is Algeria, while the most populous is Nigeria. Together those neighbours hold about 369.7 million people.

Niger is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. 3 of its neighbours, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 21 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from Niger are called Nigeriens.

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.

Inside Africa it places 18th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 5.9% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Niger sits 4th of 17 by population and 1st by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Ivory Coast just above and Mali 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.

• 🇨🇮 Ivory Coast
• 🇲🇱 Mali
• 🇳🇬 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 Mali.

Niamey is the city to remember for this country.

The top-level domain is .ne. To phone it from abroad you dial +227. Its ISO codes are ne and NER, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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.

Niger 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, Niger 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.