Explore Africa's Five Regions

How Africa is grouped by region

Africa is a single continent, but its 54 sovereign states are usually clustered into five sub-regions for analysis. The grouping you see here — North, West, East, Central, and Southern — is the one most commonly used by the African Union, the United Nations Statistics Division, and the World Bank for African coverage. The exact membership of each region varies a little between organisations: some place Sudan in North Africa (we do), others count it in East Africa; Mauritania and Western Sahara sit at the boundary between North and West and are sometimes assigned differently. We follow the most common convention and footnote any edge cases on the country profile itself.

Why group countries at all? Because most of the meaningful comparisons in African data — labour markets, regional trade, language and currency overlap, climate zone, exposure to specific shocks — make more sense within a region than across the continent as a whole. The five-way split is also how Africa\'s big regional economic communities organise themselves: ECOWAS in the west, EAC and COMESA in the east, SADC in the south, ECCAS in the centre, and a less institutionalised but heavily integrated Maghreb / Mediterranean cluster in the north. For the institutional side — the African Union and the eight Regional Economic Communities — see the AU and the RECs.

The cards below summarise each region\'s headline numbers — country count, population, combined GDP and area. Click any card to open the regional page, where every constituent country is listed in a sortable grid with population and GDP. For every country, the dedicated profile page adds capital, languages, currency, life expectancy, literacy, urbanisation, and growth rate; see the glossary for what each indicator means. For all five regions on every indicator side by side, see the regional comparison.

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