Somalia occupies the horn on the eastern coast of Africa, bordered by Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya on the west and by the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden on the east. With an area of 637,657 square kilometers (246,135 square miles) it is slightly smaller than the state of Texas. It is primarily a desert country. In the twenty-first century it remained one of the few countries in the world that had no effective central government, a condition it has been in since 1991.

Somalia's population is very difficult to estimate because of its history of civil war and instability, the lack of a recent census, and the nomadic nature of many of its people. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook estimated the population at 8,304,601 in June 2004. Whatever its size, the wellbeing of the population is poor: Somali per capita income in 2004 was estimated to be only $500 per...