Central African Republic 🇨🇫

Filed under Africa and more precisely Middle Africa, the Central African Republic is a sovereign state. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. The capital is Bangui.

Some 5.3 million people call it home, placing it 122nd of 250 by population — between Ireland above it and Palestine below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 4th of 10 in size and 7th in population.

Its territory runs to 622,984 km², which ranks it 44th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Somalia and just ahead of South Sudan. For scale, it is a little larger than Kenya.

The Central African Republic 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: DR Congo, Sudan, Cameroon and Congo 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 the Central African Republic's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in the Central African Republic's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on the Central African Republic's borders, Chad and South Sudan 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:

• 🇨🇩 DR Congo
• 🇸🇩 Sudan
• 🇨🇲 Cameroon
• 🇨🇬 Congo

Plotted on a globe it falls at 7.0° north, 21.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 779 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

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

Its land neighbours number 6: Cameroon, Chad, DR Congo, Congo, South Sudan and Sudan. The largest of them by area is DR Congo, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 227.4 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, Chad and South Sudan, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Spread across 622,984 km², that works out at about 8.6 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

It recognises 2 languages: French and Sango. Sango is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to the Central African Republic. French, the first listed, is shared with 45 other entries worldwide.

The demonym is Central African, so residents are Central Africans.

Inside Africa it places 38th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 2.4% of everyone living in Middle Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Middle Africa and Central African Republic sits 7th of 10 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Congo just above and Gabon just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇬 Congo
• 🇬🇦 Gabon
• 🇨🇩 DR Congo

It uses the Central African CFA franc (Fr, XAF). It is issued for the Central African Republic alone.

The top-level domain is .cf. Calls from overseas start with +236. In ISO terms it is cf in two letters and CAF in three.

Bangui is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

The Central African Republic is one of the 193 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.

Central African Republic does not have the Central African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 6 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XAF, 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 XAF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Central African Republic 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.