Niger Profile
Niger, officially named the Republic of Niger, is a landlocked country in Western Africa, named after the Niger River. It borders Nigeria and Benin to the south, Burkina Faso and Mali to the west, Algeria and Libya to the north and Chad to the east.
Map source: OCHA/ReliefWeb
Niger covers a land area of almost 1,270,000 km, over 80 percent of which is covered by the Sahara desert. The country's predominantly Islamic population, estimated at over 15,000,000, is mostly clustered in the far south and west of the nation. The capital city is Niamey.
Drought-prone and extremely poor, Niger often struggles to feed its population of 15.3 million people.
With little primary education, Niger has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. The health system is basic and disease is widespread.
Its main export, uranium, is prone to price fluctuations. Other livelihood mainstays, such as subsistence crops and livestock, are constantly at the mercy of drought and creeping desertification.
Niger is purportedly bargaining on oil exploration and gold mining to boost its fortunes.
For information about GOAL's work in Niger, click here.
Niger - Fact Box
| Average life expectancy: 50 (males), 51.7 (females) |
| Infant mortality rate: 79 per 1,000 live births (World Bank, 2009) |
| Children under five underweight for their age: 44 per cent |
| Probability at birth of not surviving to age of 40: 29 per cent |
| Population not using an improved water source: 58 per cent |
| People living below poverty line of US$2 a day: 85.6 per cent |
| Gross National Income (GNI) per capita: US$330 (World Bank, 2009) |
| Niger is last, 182nd of 182 countries, on the UN’s Human Development Index (2009) |
Unless otherwise stated, all statistics in the Fact Box have been sourced from the United Nations' Development Report 2009.