[Nick Cox]

It looks a bit of a mess. On a quick scan I would check the following stubs for consistency

   CentralAf*
   CoteDIvoi*
   SaoTome*
   SierraLeo*
           TZA*
    Tanzania*
         ZMB*
         ZWE*
       Zambia*
    Zimbabwe*
    otherafri*

and there may be others.

And the numeric suffixes don't seem to be consistent either.

There's not much point reshaping until you have a clean dataset with a consistent variable name convention.

Sorry, but I have to guess that this is messier than can be handled in a forum.

[William Lisowski]

Let me follow up on Nick's advice about CODE delimiters in post #12 with a slightly clearer example.

The following

[CODE]
. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 Automobile Data)

. describe make price

storage display value
variable name type format label variable label
-----------------------------------------------------------------
make str18 %-18s Make and Model
price int %8.0gc Price
[/CODE]

will be presented in the post as the following

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 Automobile Data)

. describe make price

              storage   display    value
variable name   type    format     label      variable label
-----------------------------------------------------------------
make            str18   %-18s                 Make and Model
price           int     %8.0gc                Price