Landlocked African Countries and What You Need to Know About Them

A landlocked country is a country that does not have territory connected to an ocean or whose coastlines lie on endorheic basins.  An endorheic basin, also called an internal drainage system, is a drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but drainage converges instead into lakes or swamps, permanent or seasonal, that equilibrate through evaporation. Africa is a continent of many countries; 55, to be exact. Of these 55 countries, 16 are landlocked.

A country’s level of access to water can have a huge implication on its economy. Being landlocked is more problematic for importing and exporting goods because it is much cheaper to transport products over water than over land. Land transport also takes longer. These factors make it more difficult for landlocked countries to participate in the global economy, and landlocked nations thus grow more slowly than countries that have water access.