Zimbabwe 🇿🇼

Filed under Africa and more precisely Eastern Africa, Zimbabwe is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Republic of Zimbabwe. Harare is the capital.

Around 16.6 million people live there, placing it 73rd of 249 by population — between Cambodia above it and Guinea below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 8th of 20 in size and 10th in population.

By land area it covers 390,757 km², which ranks it 62nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Paraguay and just ahead of Japan. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a little larger than Japan.

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

Of the countries on Zimbabwe's borders, Botswana and Zambia 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:

• 🇿🇦 South Africa
• 🇲🇿 Mozambique

The coordinates the dataset gives are 20.0° S, 30.0° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,226 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

New Caledonia, Fiji and Tonga sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

4 countries share a land border with it: Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. The largest of them by area is South Africa, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 122.5 million people.

It has no sea coast of its own. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, so all seaborne trade runs through a neighbour's ports. 2 of its neighbours, Botswana and Zambia, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 43 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.

Someone from Zimbabwe is a Zimbabwean.

15 languages carry official status: Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Khoisan, Ndau, Northern Ndebele, Shona, Sotho, Tonga, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zimbabwean Sign Language. Chibarwe, Kalanga, Khoisan, Ndau, Northern Ndebele, Shona, Tonga and Zimbabwean Sign Language are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Zimbabwe. Chewa, the first listed, is shared with 1 other entry worldwide.

Inside Africa it places 26th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 3.4% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Zimbabwe sits 10th of 20 by population and 8th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Somalia just above and Rwanda just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇸🇴 Somalia
• 🇷🇼 Rwanda
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

More than one currency circulates: Botswana pula (BWP), Chinese yuan (CNY), Euro (EUR), British pound (GBP), Indian rupee (INR), Japanese yen (JPY), United States dollar (USD), South African rand (ZAR) and Zimbabwean bonds (ZWB). It shares that currency with Botswana.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Zimbabwe, the answer is Harare.

Its internet country code is .zw. To phone it from abroad you dial +263. Standard country codes: zw and ZWE.

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.

Zimbabwe does not have the Botswana pula to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is BWP, and the other one is 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 BWP travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Zimbabwe 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.