The Bétés in the Krou division, the Sénoufos in the north, and the Malinkés in the northwest and the cities are the next largest groups, with 10%-15% of the national population.

Of the more than 5 million non-Ivorian Africans living in Ivory Coast, one-third to one-half are from Burkina Faso; the rest are from Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Benin, Senegal, Liberia, and Mauritania.

By contrast, at independence (in 1960), their share of the population had increased rapidly, and Muslims were moving southward to the cocoa-producing areas and the southern cities.

"[17] In earlier decades, this shift was mainly due to large-scale immigration from neighboring countries of the interior, that has been going on since colonial times and continued to be promoted during the Houphouet-Boigny era.

Since the 1990s, the widening conversion gap between different religious groups has started to tilt the demographic balance in favor of Christians.According to the last census of 2021 Muslims make up 42.5% of population (42.9% in 2014) and Christians 39.8% (33.9% in 2014).