Togo 🇹🇬

Togo is a sovereign country in Western Africa, in the wider region of Africa. The long form of the name is Togolese Republic. Lomé is the capital.

By land area it covers 56,785 km², which ranks it 127th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Svalbard and Jan Mayen and just ahead of Croatia. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is around a fifth smaller than Ireland.

Around 9.5 million people live there, placing it 97th of 249 by population — between Hungary above it and Austria below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 13th of 17 in size and 10th in population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 8.0° north, 1.2° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 891 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Ethiopia, Venezuela and Somalia — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 3: Benin, Burkina Faso and Ghana. The largest of them by area is Burkina Faso, while the most populous is Ghana. Together those neighbours hold about 72.4 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Spread across 56,785 km², that works out at about 168 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

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

Someone from Togo is a Togolese.

Inside Africa it places 33rd of 59 by population, and it accounts for 2.1% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Togo 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, Togo 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 Togo sits 10th of 17 by population and 13th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Benin just above and Sierra Leone 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.

• 🇧🇯 Benin
• 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Put next to every other entry on this site, Togo ranks 127th of 249 by area and 97th by population. That works out at 0.038% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.12% 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 Togo in the size ordering are Svalbard and Jan Mayen at 62,045 km² and Croatia at 56,594 km², against Togo's 56,785 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Togo averages 168 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 80th 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). That is a shared currency: 7 other entries use it, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast and Mali.

Lomé is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .tg. The international dialling code is +228. Standard country codes: tg and TGO.

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.