List of Regions of Africa - Physiographic Approach

Physiographic Approach

Another common approach divides Africa by using features such as landforms, climatic regions, or vegetation types:

• The Sahara Desert is the massive but largely empty region in North Africa that contains the world's second largest desert (after Antarctica).
• The Maghreb is a region of northwest Africa encompassing the coastlands and Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
• The Sahel region covers a belt of grasslands south of the Sahara stretching from Senegal to Sudan.
• The Sudan region lies just below the Sahel but is slightly more humid and arable.
• The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in East Africa that juts for hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea, and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. It encompasses Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara.
• The Guinea region is distinguished from the neighboring Sudan region by its rainforests and runs along the Atlantic coast from Guinea to Nigeria.
• The Congo is the rainforest region
• East African Rift. The region contains Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda.