Burkina Faso 🇧🇫

Burkina Faso is a country in Western Africa, one of the 17 entries this site files under that subregion. The short and official forms of the name are the same. Government sits in Ouagadougou.

It is home to roughly 23.5 million people, placing it 59th of 250 by population — between Mali above it and Taiwan below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 6th by area and 6th by population.

The land area is 272,967 km², which ranks it 76th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Ecuador and just ahead of New Zealand. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as New Zealand.

Burkina Faso 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: Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin and Togo 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 Burkina Faso's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Burkina Faso's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Burkina Faso's borders, Mali and Niger 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:

• 🇬🇭 Ghana
• 🇨🇮 Ivory Coast
• 🇧🇯 Benin
• 🇹🇬 Togo

Plotted on a globe it falls at 13.0° north, 2.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,447 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The prime meridian also passes close to it, so it straddles the line that divides east from west. Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Yemen, Thailand and the Philippines — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It borders 6 neighbours: Benin, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Togo. The largest of them by area is Niger, while the most populous is Ghana. Together those neighbours hold about 141.9 million people.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. That is true of 45 of the 250 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. 2 of its neighbours, Mali and Niger, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Spread across 272,967 km², that works out at about 86 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 90 per square kilometre.

French is the only official language. Another 45 entries list French too — among them Belgium, Benin, Burundi and Cameroon.

People from Burkina Faso are called Burkinabes.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 20th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 5.2% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Burkina Faso sits 6th of 17 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Mali just above and Senegal 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.

• 🇲🇱 Mali
• 🇸🇳 Senegal
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Money there is the West African CFA franc (Fr, XOF). Another 7 entries use the same currency — Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali and Niger among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Burkina Faso.

Websites there use the .bf domain. Calls from overseas start with +226. Its ISO codes are bf and BFA, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Burkina Faso, the answer is Ouagadougou.

As a sovereign state it is among the 193 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.

Burkina Faso 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, Burkina Faso 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.