Median age in Sierra Leone
The median age in Sierra Leone is 19.5 years (2024): half the population is older, half younger. That is 11.1 years younger than the world median of 30.6, and makes Sierra Leone the 158th oldest of 193 countries.
Key numbers
Sierra Leone among its neighbours
In plain language
Line up everyone in Sierra Leone by age. The person in the middle is 19.5. That is the median: it says nothing about how old the oldest are or how many babies were born last year, only where the midpoint falls.
A median of 19.5 is younger than the world's 30.6. For scale, the youngest country here, Central African Republic, has a median of 14.4 and the oldest, Japan, 49.4. Life expectancy at birth in Sierra Leone is 61.8 years, so a person at the median age has, on a rough reckoning, about 42.3 years ahead of them.
The 2024figure is the UN's medium-variant number; its estimates end in 2023. For a year this close the projection barely differs from an estimate, since everyone counted has already been born.
Questions
- What is the median age in Sierra Leone?
- 19.5 years in 2024, by the UN World Population Prospects 2024. Half of the people in Sierra Leone are younger than 19.5 and half are older. The median is not the average age; it is the midpoint, so a handful of very old people do not move it.
- Is Sierra Leone's population young or old?
- Young. Sierra Leone is 11.1 years below the world median of 30.6, and ranks 158th oldest of the 193 countries here. The youngest country, Central African Republic, has a median of 14.4; the oldest, Japan, 49.4.
- How does Sierra Leone compare to Senegal?
- Senegal has a median age of 19.4, 0.1 years younger than Sierra Leone. The two sit next to each other in the ranking, at 36th and 35th youngest.
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