Chad

Chad is a landlocked country in Central Africa bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest and Niger to the west, covering roughly 1.3 million square kilometers, Africa's fifth-largest country and the twentieth-largest in the world. N'Djamena, with about 1.6 million residents, is the capital and largest city of a country whose population reached an estimated 20 million by 2026; French and Arabic are the official languages, with French serving as the lingua franca, and the population is mostly Muslim, at 55.1 percent, with a large Christian minority at 41.1 percent. Successive empires controlled the region's trans-Saharan trade routes from the seventh millennium BC onward; France completed its colonization of the territory by 1920, incorporating it into French Equatorial Africa, and Chad gained independence in 1960 under President Francois Tombalbaye, after which the country experienced prolonged civil conflict. Idriss Deby ruled Chad from 1990 until his death in 2021, after which his son led a transitional government before winning the 2024 presidential election; the country, governed as a presidential republic with power concentrated in the presidency, ranks among the world's least developed nations despite oil exports that have been its primary revenue source since 2003.