"Fast Facts About West Africa"

  Demographics:
    *22 countries with a population of 240 million
    *Cape Verde, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana,     Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon,     Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon and Congo

   People Information
    *Approximately three-fourths of the region’s population (72.6%) is under 30 years of age.
    *45% of the population are 14 years of age or younger
    *West Africa has 1,612 people groups
    *355 or 22% of the people groups have not heard the name of Jesus and are not engaged       by anyone!

    *Religions in West Africa
    --Christianity
        -Of the population, 39.4% claim to be Christians.
        -A large majority of the Christians live in the country of Nigeria.
    --Islam
        -50.1% of the West African population is Muslim.
        -Islam is a social system as well as a religion; therefore, leaving Islam often means being         abandoned by one’s family and culture.
    --African Traditional Religion
         -10.5% of the population is involved with African Traditional Religion (ATR), sometimes         called Animism.
        -ATR, which involves the worship of ancestors, is the way a large number of Africans,
        including many who claim Islam or Christianity, look at the world and experiences of life.
        -To all Africans, life is communal rather than individual.

    *Approximately one-half of West Africa’s people groups are unreached, meaning that less than 2 percent are evangelical Christians.

    *One-third of the people groups are Last Frontier peoples. These are people groups who are less than 2 percent evangelical Christians and haven’t had a church planted among them in the last two years.