African Countries Wheel Spinner
This wheel picks a random African country, which is a fast way to hand out geography projects or find somewhere to read about that you would not have chosen yourself.
All 54 African countries are on the wheel, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, so a spin can land on Comoros or Eswatini as readily as on Nigeria or Egypt.
The list is UN member states, which is why 54 rather than some other number. With all 54 loaded, the wheel is genuinely unpredictable: a class of thirty can draw thirty different countries with remove-after-spin on and never see a repeat. That matters more than it sounds, because a short wheel repeats within a few spins and students stop believing the draw.
The reason to draw rather than choose is worth stating plainly. Left to pick, a class will gravitate to the same handful of countries every year, and the rest of the continent stays invisible. A wheel with 54 slices routinely lands on Malawi or Benin, and the project that comes back is more interesting for it.
For travel, it works the same way on a shortlist that has stopped moving.
What is on the wheel
All 54 of them, already loaded:
- Algeria
- Angola
- Benin
- Botswana
- Burkina Faso
- Burundi
- Cabo Verde
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- Comoros
- Congo
- DR Congo
- Côte d'Ivoire
- Djibouti
- Egypt
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Eswatini
- Ethiopia
- Gabon
- Gambia
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Kenya
- Lesotho
- Liberia
- Libya
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Mali
- Mauritania
- Mauritius
- Morocco
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Rwanda
- São Tomé and Príncipe
- Senegal
- Seychelles
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Africa
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Tanzania
- Togo
- Tunisia
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
African Countries Wheel Spinner — questions
Does the wheel include every African country?
Yes. All 54 UN member states in Africa are already on it, so there is nothing to paste in before you use it. You can still delete any you do not want, or replace the list entirely with a region such as West Africa.
Can I use this to assign projects without repeats?
Yes. Turn on "Remove winner after spin" and each country drops off once drawn, so every student or group gets a different one.
Can I narrow it to one region?
Yes. Replace the slices with just West Africa, or just the Sahel, or whichever grouping you are teaching, and the wheel will only pick from those.