Insights
Data-driven analysis of population, demographics and global trends — each insight built from the numbers on this site and linked to the tools behind them.
Featured insight
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.
2026-08-08 Read insight
Explainer
Germany needs 400,000 newcomers a year just to hold steady
With deaths exceeding births by a wide margin, the labour math is blunt.
2026-08-08
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America's growth is now mostly immigration
Natural increase has thinned to a trickle. The arithmetic has quietly flipped.
2026-08-08
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Nobody knows Nigeria's population, roughly speaking
Estimates for Africa's giant range across tens of millions. The census keeps slipping.
2026-08-08
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China's population decline has started, gently for now
Deaths now outnumber births. The next decades are already written in the age pyramid.
2026-08-08
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India passed China, and is already slowing down
The world's most populous country now has below-replacement fertility.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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Half a billion people share the Nile basin
Eleven countries, one river, and populations that will nearly double before the century's end.
2026-08-08
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Two demographic worlds are drifting apart
Median age 19 in Sudan, 45 in Germany, 48 in Japan. The consequences touch everything.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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The 2008 census's long shadow (Arabic)
كل رقم حالي عن السودان إسقاط من تعداد أُجري قبل انتشار الهواتف الذكية هنا.
2026-08-08
Explainer
Tobacco in Sudan (Arabic)
انتشار التدخين بين البالغين معتدل عالمياً، لكن السجائر ليست سوى نصف حكاية التبغ.
2026-08-08
Explainer
Gezira: canals built a state (Arabic)
مشروع ري عمره قرن يفسر كيف تحمل رقعة صغيرة من الأرض ستة ملايين إنسان.
2026-08-08
Explainer
The most misleading honest number (Arabic)
متوسط الكثافة في السودان 26 نسمة للكيلومتر المربع، ولا أحد تقريباً يعيش بهذه الكثافة.
2026-08-08
Explainer
The quiet second economy (Arabic)
أموال المغتربين تنافس كبرى الصادرات، ومعظمها لا يمر عبر المصارف أصلاً.
2026-08-08
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Port Sudan's sudden weight (Arabic)
كانت ولاية البحر الأحمر إقليماً ساحلياً هادئاً، ثم غيّرتها الحرب وتحولات التجارة بسرعة.
2026-08-08
Explainer
Two in five under fifteen (Arabic)
متوسط العمر في السودان دون العشرين، ورقم واحد يفسر الكثير عن المدارس والوظائف.
2026-08-08
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The education divide (Arabic)
معدلات القراءة والكتابة في الشمالية ونهر النيل تسبق أجزاء من دارفور بثلاثين نقطة كاملة.
2026-08-08
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Khartoum after the exodus (Arabic)
كانت العاصمة تضم قرابة تسعة ملايين نسمة قبل 2023. عدّ من بقي فيها اليوم مهمة عسيرة.
2026-08-08
Explainer
A reader's guide to the live counter (Arabic)
العداد على صفحتنا الرئيسية إسقاط حسابي وليس عداً مباشراً. هكذا تقرأه بشكل صحيح.
2026-08-08
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Gedaref grows the sorghum that steadies the country
Mechanised rain-fed farming made this eastern state Sudan's grain marketplace.
2026-08-08
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Malaria is still Sudan's most counted disease
Millions of cases a year make malaria a demographic force, not just a medical one.
2026-08-08
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Blue Nile state is Sudan in miniature
Fifty-plus communities, gold, a giant dam and hard statistics in one small southeastern state.
2026-08-08
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Half the population, harder to count
From birth registration to labour surveys, women are undercounted in specific, fixable ways.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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Where our numbers come from
WorldPop grids, UN projections, World Bank indicators, WHO surveys: what each source is good for.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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A 2.6 percent growth rate doubles a country in 27 years
The rule of 70 is the quickest mental math in demography.
2026-08-08
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White Nile: sugar towns on a slow river
Kenana and Assalaya made the White Nile an industrial corridor before that was fashionable.
2026-08-08
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Sudanese fertility is falling, just slowly
From over six children per woman in the 1980s to around four and a half today.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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Urbanisation is a one-way door
About a third of Sudanese live in cities, and the share only moves in one direction.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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Remittances are Sudan's quiet second economy
Money sent home by Sudanese abroad rivals major exports, and most of it never touches a bank.
2026-08-08
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The world's largest displacement crisis is Sudanese
More than ten million people have moved since April 2023, most of them inside the country.
2026-08-08
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Population density is the most misleading honest number
Sudan averages 26 people per square kilometre. Almost nobody lives at that density.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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Gezira: where the irrigation scheme built a state
A century-old irrigation project explains why a modest patch of land holds six million people.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08
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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.
2026-08-08