Articles & analysis

states · Indonesia

Indonesia is moving its capital away from a sinking city

Jakarta holds over 30 million people in its metro area, parts of it subsiding fast.

population · Germany

Germany needs 400,000 newcomers a year just to hold steady

With deaths exceeding births by a wide margin, the labour math is blunt.

migration · United States

America's growth is now mostly immigration

Natural increase has thinned to a trickle. The arithmetic has quietly flipped.

data-notes · Nigeria

Nobody knows Nigeria's population, roughly speaking

Estimates for Africa's giant range across tens of millions. The census keeps slipping.

population · China

China's population decline has started, gently for now

Deaths now outnumber births. The next decades are already written in the age pyramid.

population · India

India passed China, and is already slowing down

The world's most populous country now has below-replacement fertility.

economy · Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's population is 58 percent male. Here's why.

The kingdom's skewed sex ratio is a migration story, not a biological one.

population · Egypt

Egypt: 114 million people on 4 percent of the land

Egypt's paper density is unremarkable. Its lived density is among the highest on earth.

world

Half a billion people share the Nile basin

Eleven countries, one river, and populations that will nearly double before the century's end.

world

Two demographic worlds are drifting apart

Median age 19 in Sudan, 45 in Germany, 48 in Japan. The consequences touch everything.

world

The world is still growing, just more slowly every year

Global growth peaked at 2.3 percent in the 1960s. It is under one percent now.

data-notes · Sudan

ظل التعداد الأخير: 2008

كل رقم حالي عن السودان إسقاط من تعداد أُجري قبل انتشار الهواتف الذكية هنا.

health · Sudan

التدخين في السودان: أقل مما تتوقع وأكثر تعقيداً

انتشار التدخين بين البالغين معتدل عالمياً، لكن السجائر ليست سوى نصف حكاية التبغ.

states · Sudan

الجزيرة: حين بنت القنوات ولاية

مشروع ري عمره قرن يفسر كيف تحمل رقعة صغيرة من الأرض ستة ملايين إنسان.

data-notes

الكثافة السكانية: أصدق الأرقام تضليلاً

متوسط الكثافة في السودان 26 نسمة للكيلومتر المربع، ولا أحد تقريباً يعيش بهذه الكثافة.

economy · Sudan

التحويلات: الاقتصاد الثاني الهادئ

أموال المغتربين تنافس كبرى الصادرات، ومعظمها لا يمر عبر المصارف أصلاً.

states · Sudan

بورتسودان: المدينة التي انتقل إليها كل شيء

كانت ولاية البحر الأحمر إقليماً ساحلياً هادئاً، ثم غيّرتها الحرب وتحولات التجارة بسرعة.

population · Sudan

اثنان من كل خمسة سودانيين تحت الخامسة عشرة

متوسط العمر في السودان دون العشرين، ورقم واحد يفسر الكثير عن المدارس والوظائف.

education · Sudan

خريطة التعليم في السودان: فجوة الثلاثين نقطة

معدلات القراءة والكتابة في الشمالية ونهر النيل تسبق أجزاء من دارفور بثلاثين نقطة كاملة.

population · Sudan

الخرطوم بعد الخروج الكبير

كانت العاصمة تضم قرابة تسعة ملايين نسمة قبل 2023. عدّ من بقي فيها اليوم مهمة عسيرة.

data-notes

دليل القارئ إلى العداد المباشر

العداد على صفحتنا الرئيسية إسقاط حسابي وليس عداً مباشراً. هكذا تقرأه بشكل صحيح.

states · Sudan

Gedaref grows the sorghum that steadies the country

Mechanised rain-fed farming made this eastern state Sudan's grain marketplace.

health · Sudan

Malaria is still Sudan's most counted disease

Millions of cases a year make malaria a demographic force, not just a medical one.

states · Sudan

Blue Nile state is Sudan in miniature

Fifty-plus communities, gold, a giant dam and hard statistics in one small southeastern state.

data-notes

Half the population, harder to count

From birth registration to labour surveys, women are undercounted in specific, fixable ways.

states · Sudan

Sennar, the old kingdom at the grid's edge

A sixteenth-century sultanate's capital is now a mid-sized state where the national power grid was born.

data-notes

Where our numbers come from

WorldPop grids, UN projections, World Bank indicators, WHO surveys: what each source is good for.

states · Sudan

Northern state: a million people in a landscape built for none

Sudan's largest state by area is its emptiest by density, and its most schooled.

data-notes

A 2.6 percent growth rate doubles a country in 27 years

The rule of 70 is the quickest mental math in demography.

states · Sudan

White Nile: sugar towns on a slow river

Kenana and Assalaya made the White Nile an industrial corridor before that was fashionable.

population · Sudan

Sudanese fertility is falling, just slowly

From over six children per woman in the 1980s to around four and a half today.

states · Sudan

Kassala has always been a border town writ large

Wedged against Eritrea, Kassala's three million people live in one of Sudan's most compact, most diverse states.

economy · Sudan

The gum arabic belt feeds the world's soft drinks

Kordofan's acacia belt supplies most of the planet's gum arabic, and shapes where its people live.

states · Sudan

Why Darfur is five states, and what that means for counting

One historic region, five administrations, nine million people, and some of the country's weakest data.

population · Sudan

Urbanisation is a one-way door

About a third of Sudanese live in cities, and the share only moves in one direction.

population · Sudan

Sudan is a river with a country attached

Trace the Nile and its two arms on our map and you have traced most of the population.

data-notes · Sudan

Sudan's last census was in 2008. That shadow is long.

Every current figure for Sudan is a projection from a count taken before smartphones were common here.

data-notes

Why we show male/female ratios, and how to read them

Slightly more boys are born everywhere. What happens after that varies by geography and migration.

economy · Sudan

Remittances are Sudan's quiet second economy

Money sent home by Sudanese abroad rivals major exports, and most of it never touches a bank.

migration · Sudan

The world's largest displacement crisis is Sudanese

More than ten million people have moved since April 2023, most of them inside the country.

data-notes

Population density is the most misleading honest number

Sudan averages 26 people per square kilometre. Almost nobody lives at that density.

education · Sudan

The education map splits along the Nile

Literacy in Northern and River Nile states runs 30 points ahead of parts of Darfur. The gap has old roots.

health · Sudan

Smoking in Sudan: lower than you'd guess, and complicated

Adult smoking prevalence is moderate by global standards, but cigarettes are only part of the tobacco story.

health · Sudan

The quiet halving of Sudan's death rate

In the 1960s Sudan's crude death rate was over 20 per thousand. Today it is near 7. The reasons are mostly unglamorous.

population · Sudan

What a birth rate of 33 actually feels like

Crude birth rate is a dry ratio. Converted to daily life, it means a delivery every 20 seconds nationwide.

states · Sudan

Port Sudan grew because everything else moved to it

The Red Sea state was a quiet coastal province. War traffic and trade rerouting changed that fast.

data-notes

The hardest people to count are always moving

Pastoralist families cross state and national borders with the seasons. Censuses have struggled with them for a century.

states · Sudan

Gezira: where the irrigation scheme built a state

A century-old irrigation project explains why a modest patch of land holds six million people.

population · Sudan

Two out of five Sudanese are under fifteen

Sudan's median age sits below twenty. That single number explains a lot about schools, jobs and politics.

population · Sudan

Khartoum's population is a moving target

The capital held close to nine million people before 2023. Counting who is there now is genuinely hard.

data-notes

How to read a live population counter

The number ticking on our homepage is a projection, not a headcount. Here is what it actually measures.