graphing Cameroon

I'm sorry to say that many people in the US know little about Cameroon. They may not even know it's an African country, or that it's not an island country. I had that last assumption for a little while, perhaps confusing "the Cameroons," which was the name of the country when divided between British and French colonial rule following WWI, with the island nation of Comoros, off Mozambique. Most of this blog is about sharing our direct experience of Cameroon, but I thought it might be interesting to look at the numbers briefly. Since you can draw charts with Google, here are a few charts comparing some numbers between the US, all of Africa, and Cameroon. As a farewell gift to Karen (see previous post), I'm throwing in Canada too.

Population
Africa: 922 million
Cameroon: 18 million
Canada: 33 million
US: 304 million

Land Area in Square Miles
Africa: ~11.7 million
Cameroon: ~184 thousand
Canada: ~3.9 million
US: ~3.8 million

Human habitation
Africa: ~200,000 years (ie, all of it)
Cameroon: ~85,000 years (Neolithic period)
Canada: ~26,500 years
US: ~12,000 years

GDP
Africa: $2.16 trillion
Cameroon: $42.5 billion ($0.04 trillion)
Canada: $1.274 trillion
US: $13.13 trillion

GDP per Capita
Cameroon: $2421
Canada: $38,200
US: $43,444

Human Development Index
("normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita")

Cameroon: 0.532
Canada: 0.961
US: 0.951

(sources: Google, and the Wikipedia pages on Africa, Cameroon, Canada and the USA. Thanks to Dave for prompting me to put this together on an idle Saturday, since he said he likes graphs.)