Some Thoughts on the Population of Namibia

In researching one of my presentation topics I was surprised to read that Windhoek, Namibia's capital and largest city, has a population of just 330,000. For some reason I'd expected it to be much larger, probably because the only African cities that come to mind for me are places like Nairobi and Capetown and Cairo, holding millions. The number 330,000 struck me particularly because it's just a bit bigger than my hometown of Anchorage, which is the largest city in Alaska, and I began to understand the sparse population of Namibia much better. The next largest cities in Namibia are Rundu, on the border with Angola, and Walvis Bay on the coast, both with about 62,000 people. In Alaska, the next largest are Juneau and Fairbanks, with 32,000 each. Namibia's population density is 2.6 people/square mile, twice that of Alaska, and the country is half the size of my state.

These musings are probably not very relevant to anyone but myself in framing the population distribution of Namibia, but they definitely gave me a better sense of how remote our travel will be. To put it into terms that might be more relatable, Namibia is just a bit bigger than Texas, but has one-tenth of the population of the state.

Another interesting descriptor of Namibia's low population density is that it has about 26,000 miles of roads (as a comparison, Texas has over 650,000 miles of road). Only 14% of those roads are paved (3,640 miles), or about 2.5 San Franciscos of paved road spread throughout a whole country.

Here's a map of the population density, with Windhoek as the darkest dot in the center:

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/namibia-population/

- Madelyn

Sources:
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&met_y=population&hl=en&dl=en
https://tradingeconomics.com/namibia/roads-paved-percent-of-total-roads-wb-data.html
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/wa.html