I’m at a bit of a brick wall – I think this probably has a really simple solution, but I’m not quite sure where to start.

**Problem**: I can’t figure out how to calculate the area of various categories in a raster file, based on country boundaries in a shapefile.

**Description of raster**:
Environmental data based on 15 categories of land cover. The attribute table has three fields: Objectid, Value and Count. 
Value stores a category label, 1-15. I have a separate dbf which maps these to land cover (e.g. large forest, small forest, lake, sea) and Type of cover (e.g. forest, water), but I’m not sure if I should be bringing that in at this stage. I have one version where I’ve joined it to the raster att table, and another version where they’re still separate. 

**Description of shapefile:**
This stores various boundaries. The attribute table has 6 fields: FID, Shape, Country, Province, Region, Area.

**What I want to achieve:**
There are five countries. For each country, I want to know the area of forest, the area of water etc. 

**Rough Illustration**

Dbf table:

[![enter image description here][1]][1]
 
Raster attribute table:

[![enter image description here][2]][2]
 
Shapefile att table:

[![enter image description here][3]][3]
 
Goal:

[![enter image description here][4]][4]
 
Whether “Forest” and “Water” actually contain the km2 area, or just a cell count that I can convert based on cell size – I don’t mind. It would also be OK to still have Description (large forest, small forest) rather than grouped Type (forest), since I will be analysing everything in Excel anyway (sweet home, Excel).

I thought Zonal Statistics might be a good place to start, but I don’t think that will really achieve what I’m after, since I want to split out the data in the raster. I used that previously with the same shapefile, trying to get the population across each country. But I suppose that was a case of getting less detailed (summing across provinces), whereas now I want to get more detailed (split the “Count” field by country).

Can anyone point me in the right direction to get started?

  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/lVohq.png
  [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/FyZBr.png
  [3]: https://i.sstatic.net/T4w3q.png
  [4]: https://i.sstatic.net/OaeGS.png