Algeria is the biggest country in Africa, with an area exceeding 2.38 million square kilometers as of 2020. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan follow with a total area of around 2.34 million and 1.88 million square kilometers, respectively. On the other hand, Seychelles is the smallest country on the continent, with an area of only 460 square kilometers. Overall, Africa’s total area exceeds 30 million square kilometers, being the second largest continent in the world after Asia. Nigeria and Ethiopia lead the ranking of the most populated countries in Africa.

How have the African countries been formed?

The political geography of Africa has been influenced by its colonial history. Between the 19th and 20th Century, the European colonizers have divided up Africa. The partition of the territories was merely driven by strategic purposes: Borders between countries were artificially created in the absence of a geographic border. Following the decolonization, most countries gained their independence in the second half of the 1900s. The newest country in Africa is South Sudan, which became independent in 2011.

Africa's physical geography

Geographically, the African continent is mostly constituted by plains and tablelands. Inner plateaus are prevalent in the sub-Saharan region. In the center-north, the arid Sahara Desert extends for around nine million square kilometers, being the largest subtropical desert in the world. The continent also has some of the biggest water basins worldwide, namely the Nile, Congo, and Niger rivers. East Africa has, instead, the highest summit on the continent, the Kilimanjaro. Peaking at 5,895 meters, the mountain dominates Tanzania’s landscape and attracts thousands of climbers each year.

This horizontal bar chart displays land area (km²) by countries using the aggregation sum in Western Africa. The data is about countries.

This dataset provides values for ARABLE LAND PERCENT OF LAND AREA WB DATA.HTML reported in several countries. The data includes current values, previous releases, historical highs and record lows, release frequency, reported unit and currency.

Land area (sq. km) in South Africa was reported at 1213090 sq. Km in 2023, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. South Africa - Land area (sq. km) - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on October of 2025.

Sudan had the largest agricultural land area in Africa in 2022, corresponding to around 112.7 million hectares. Following, South Africa and Nigeria had roughly 96.3 million and 69.8 million hectares of land under agricultural activities, respectively. In proportion to the total land area, Lesotho was the African country with the largest share of land devoted to agriculture.

The Global Burned Area 2000 initiative (GBA2000) was launched by the Global Vegetation Mapping Unit of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, in partnership with several other institutions, to develop reliable and quantitative information on the global magnitude and spatial distribution of biomass burning. The objective of GBA2000 was to produce a map of the areas burned globally for the year 2000, using the medium resolution satellite imagery provided by the SPOT-VEGETATION (VGT) system and to derive statistics of area burned per type of vegetation cover. A subset of the global GBA20000 map was prepared for SAFARI 2000 to map the area burned in sub-Saharan Africa during 2000 on a monthly basis using VGT imagery at 1 km spatial resolution. Burned areas were identified with a classification tree, relying only on the near-infrared channel of VGT. The data used in this work are in the S1 daily synthesis format, i.e. the data are radiometrically calibrated, precisely geo-located, and corrected for atmospheric effects.The data are binary image files of area burned, BSQ format in geographic projection. There is one file for each month of 2000 and one file for all of the year 2000. There is also a comma-delimited ASCII text file that provides geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the center of each pixel indicated as a burned area for all of 2000.

The average for 2021 based on 53 countries was 14.9 percent. The highest value was in Rwanda: 51.4 percent and the lowest value was in Djibouti: 0.1 percent. The indicator is available from 1961 to 2022. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

This statistic provides information on the size of lakes of the Great Lakes of Africa as of 2016. Lake Victoria covers an area of around ****** square kilometers and is the continent's largest lake. Lake Victoria is the second largest freshwater lake in the world based on surface area.

Africa Surface area (sq. km) Dataset

  Overview

This dataset contains surface area (sq. km) data for African countries from the World Bank.

  Data Details

Indicator Code: AG.SRF.TOTL.K2 Description: Surface area (sq. km) Geographic Coverage: 54 African countries Time Period: 1961-2022 Data Points: 3,265 observations Coverage: 93.02% of possible country-year combinations

  File Formats





  Main Dataset (ag_srf_totl_k2_africa.csv)

Rows: 54… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/electricsheepafrica/Africa-Surface-area-sq-km.

Historical dataset showing Africa surface area by year from N/A to N/A.

Agricultural activities occupied roughly 39.21 percent of Africa's total land area in 2022. The share of land used for agriculture followed a slightly increasing trend since 2010, increasing from around 37.9 percent that year. Currently, Africa's agricultural land covers over 1.1 billion hectares.

This horizontal bar chart displays land area (km²) by countries using the aggregation sum in Middle Africa. The data is about countries.

The African Cities Population Database (ACPD) has been produced by the Birkbeck College of the University of London in 1990 at the request of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya. The database contains head counts for 479 cities in Africa which either have a population of over 20,000 or are capitals of their nation state. Listed are the geographical location of the cities and their population sizes. The material is primarily derived from a 1988 report of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and several issues of the United Nations Demographic Yearbook (1973-81). Severe problems were found with several countries such as Togo, Ghana and South Africa. For South Africa, the data were derived from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook 1987.

WCPD is an Arc/Info point coverage. It has no projection, as the cities are located on the basis of their latitude and longitude. Coordinates were assigned on the basis of gazetteers or African maps. Each record in the data base contains details of the city name, country name, latitude and longitude of the city, and its population at a defined time. The Arc/Info attribute table contains the following fields:

AREA Arc/Info item PERIMETER Arc/Info item ACPD# Arc/Info item ACPD-ID Arc/Info item ID-NUM Unique number for each city CITY City name COUNTRY Country name CITY-POP Population of city proper YEAR Latest available year of collection

ACPD comes as an Arc/Info EXPORT file originally called "ACPD.E00" and contains 67 Kb of data. The file has a record length of 80 and a block size of 8000 (blocking factor = 100). The file can be read from tape using Arc/Info's TAPEREAD command or any other generic copy utility. If distributed on a diskette it can be read using the ordinary DOS 'COPY' command. The file has to be converted to Arc/Info internal format using its IMPORT command.

References to the WCPD data set can be found in:

• SERLL News, Issue No. 1, January 1991, Birkbeck College, London, UK.
• D. Rhind. "Cartographically-related research at Birkbeck College 1987-91" in: The Cartographic Journal, Vol. 28, June 1991, pp. 63-66.

The source of the WCPD data set as held by GRID is Birkbeck College, University of London, Department of Geography, London, UK.

This horizontal bar chart displays forest area (km²) by continent using the aggregation sum in Africa. The data is about countries.

The Nile is the longest river in Africa. Its length is around 6,650 kilometers, and its drainage basin covers 11 African countries. The Congo is the second-longest river on the African continent, having an approximate length of 4,700 kilometers. Its drainage basin covers the area of the Congo Rainforest, the second-biggest in the world after the Amazon. The third longest river in Africa is the Niger, which extending for 4,180 kilometers.

The Nile River

The Nile is not only the longest river in Africa but also contends for the title of the longest river in the world with the Amazon River. With an area of 3.3 million square kilometers, the Nile has the third-largest drainage basin globally, after the Amazon and the Congo rivers. The two main tributaries of the Nile are the White Nile, originating from Lake Victoria between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and the Blue Nile, which springs from Lake Tana in Ethiopia. In ancient times, the Nile coasts were subject to constant seasonal flooding. The fertile soil surrounding the river allowed the development of agricultural activities in Egypt. Still today, the Nile coasts are the most inhabited areas in Egypt, as the rest of the country remains predominantly desert.

Geography of Africa

The physical geography of Africa varies across regions. Desert areas are prevalent in the center-north of the continent. With an area of around nine million square kilometers, the Sahara Desert is the largest subtropical desert worldwide. In contrast, the sub-Saharan region is characterized by plateaus. East Africa hosts the continent’s highest mountains: Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. Worldwide, Africa is the continent with the largest land area after Asia. Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the largest countries in Africa. They extend over around 2.4 million and 2.3 million square kilometers, respectively.

Flood maps of previous year provides valuable information as it indicates historical flood extents. For this project we can at least show flood extents from 2013 onwards and aim, if time permits, to extend the inundated layers back to 2000.for more information visit: http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/WebMapServerDataLinks.html

Africa Forest area (% of land area) Dataset

  Overview

This dataset contains forest area (% of land area) data for African countries from the World Bank.

  Data Details

Indicator Code: AG.LND.FRST.ZS Description: Forest area (% of land area) Geographic Coverage: 54 African countries Time Period: 1990-2022 Data Points: 1,732 observations Coverage: 49.34% of possible country-year combinations

  File Formats





  Main Dataset (ag_lnd_frst_zs_africa.csv)… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/electricsheepafrica/Africa-Forest-area-percentage-of-land-area.

Africa's forested area shrank to *** million hectares in 2020. The continent lost around ** million hectares of forest area in comparison to 2010, a deforestation tendency continuously observed in the last decades. For instance, Africa has lost around ** percent of its forests since 1990.

This dataset provides values for ROAD DENSITY KM OF ROAD PER SQ KM OF LAND AREA WB DATA.HTML reported in several countries. The data includes current values, previous releases, historical highs and record lows, release frequency, reported unit and currency.

This horizontal bar chart displays rural land area (km²) by country using the aggregation sum in Africa. The data is about countries.