Situated on the west coast of Africa, Togo has land boundaries with Burkina Faso to the north, Benin to the east, and Ghana to the west. Its southern border is on the shore of the the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. The country is traversed in the center by a chain of hills, the Atkora Mountains.

Togo's small sub-Saharan economy is heavily dependent on both commercial and subsistence agriculture, which provides employment for 65 per cent of the labour force. Cocoa, coffee, and cotton together generate about 30 per cent of Togo's export earnings. In the early 1990s, the Government of Togo launched decade-long effort, supported by the World Bank and the IMF, to implement economic reform measures, encourage foreign investment, and bring revenues in line with expenditures. But this effort was undermined by political unrest, including private and public sector strikes throughout 1992 and 1993. Lack of foreign aid, along with depressed cocoa prices, generated a one per cent fall in GDP in 1998.

Only in French