The African Great Lakes Region is the region of east-central Africa surrounding the chain of Great Rift Valley lakes, including Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Albert, and encompassing Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Densely populated and ethnically diverse, the region has experienced some of the most severe conflicts in modern African history, including the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the subsequent wars in the eastern Congo, even as it also holds some of the continent's richest agricultural land and freshwater resources.
Facts
PopulationDocumented as a 2020 estimate of "more than 50 million"; no more recent or more precise total for the whole region was found in the cited source. Classification
Region TypePhysiographic or Climatic Region 1 Region TypePhysiographic or Climatic Region 1 Connections
Shaped By
Source African Great Lakes (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. The African Great Lakes Region (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationIntroductionQuote, Introduction
The African Great Lakes (Swahili: Maziwa Makuu; Kinyarwanda: Ibiyaga bigari) are a series of lakes constituting the part of the Rift Valley lakes in and around the East African Rift.
2. African Great Lakes (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationhistory/formation section
Because of its high population-estimated to be more than 50 million people in 2020-and the agricultural surplus in the region, the area became organized into a number of small states.
Shaped By: Continental Rifting, Geology/formation-of-the-lakes section
This rift began when East Africa, impelled by currents in the mantle, began separating from the rest of Africa, moving to the northeast.
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