Djibouti 🇩🇯

Djibouti is a country in Eastern Africa, one of the 20 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is Republic of Djibouti. The capital is Djibouti, the same name as the country, which is the usual sign of a city-state.

It covers 23,200 km², which ranks it 152nd of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind North Macedonia and just ahead of Belize. For scale, it is around a fifth smaller than Belgium.

The population is about 1.2 million, placing it 161st of 250 by population — between Eswatini above it and Fiji below. Among the 20 entries in Eastern Africa it ranks 14th by area and 15th by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 11.5° north, 43.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,280 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Nigeria, the Philippines and Burkina Faso — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It borders 3 neighbours: Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. The largest of them by area is Ethiopia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 154.6 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 50 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.

2 languages carry official status: Arabic and French. Arabic, the first listed, is shared with 24 other entries worldwide.

People from Djibouti are called Djiboutis.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 50th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

The Djiboutian franc (DJF) is used only in Djibouti among the 250 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Djibouti 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.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Djibouti sits 15th of 20 by population and 14th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Mauritius just above and Réunion 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.

• 🇲🇺 Mauritius
• 🇷🇪 Réunion
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

Put next to every other entry on this site, Djibouti ranks 152nd of 250 by area and 161st by population. That works out at 0.015% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.014% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Djibouti in the size ordering are North Macedonia at 25,713 km² and Belize at 22,966 km², against Djibouti's 23,200 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Djibouti averages 50 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 168th of the 248 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Money there is the Djiboutian franc (Fr, DJF). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Websites there use the .dj domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +253. Its ISO codes are dj and DJI, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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.