Average Height in Angola (Men & Women)

Average height in Angola

Angolan men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 167.3 cm (5′6″), and Angolan women 157.3 cm (5′2″). The figures come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), the global network of health researchers whose country estimates we use throughout this site, including in the height comparison tool.

Among the 200 countries and territories in our dataset, that ranks Angolan men 149th and Angolan women 136th. The gap between the sexes is 10.0 cm, which is narrower than the roughly 12 cm global average for the 1996 cohort. That narrow gap is typical of several Central and West African countries in the data, where women are relatively tall compared with men.

The most important thing to know about Angola's numbers is in the last row of that table. Angolans born in 1996 are shorter than their parents' generation. Explaining why takes a closer look at what the estimates measure and at the history of the country.

What the estimates measure

NCD-RisC organises height by birth cohort. The value for 1996 is the expected height at age 18 of people born in that year, which makes it possible to compare generations directly instead of mixing together adults of all ages, as a single survey would.

The collaboration's 2016 study pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured height on more than 18.6 million people around the world, and used only measured, never self-reported, height. Its statistical model gave more weight to national data than to local or community studies and borrowed information from similar countries and the wider region where national data were sparse. The study authors acknowledge that for some countries the data were limited or came from subnational studies, so the uncertainty is wider. Angola, which went through decades of conflict, is one of the countries where that caveat matters.

Our World in Data publishes the same series in an interactive chart if you want to see Angola's curve beside other countries.

A century of Angolan height: growth, then reversal

The first half of the series shows steady growth. Men born in 1956 were 7.0 cm taller than men born in 1896, and women gained 6.5 cm. Women's height then peaked with the 1956 cohort and men's with the 1976 cohort. After that, both fell. The 1996 cohort is 2.6 cm shorter than the male peak and 1.8 cm shorter than the female peak.

As a result, the net gain over the full century is small: 5.1 cm for men and 4.7 cm for women, compared with gains of 15 to 20 cm in countries such as South Korea and Iran, which NCD-RisC identified as the biggest risers.

A pattern shared across sub-Saharan Africa

Angola's reversal is not unique. One of the headline findings of the NCD-RisC study was that adult height decreased, or at best stayed the same, in many sub-Saharan African countries for people born after the early 1960s, in some cases by around 5 cm from the peak. The authors gave Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda as examples.

The study offered several possible explanations for the regional pattern, drawing on earlier research:

• Rising childhood stunting. Prior work had documented an increase in stunting among children in sub-Saharan Africa that continued until the mid-1990s, and the authors suggest that this childhood adversity carried through into adult height.
• Loss of an earlier dietary advantage. A century ago, African populations were taller than many Asian ones, possibly because of more varied diets and lower population density. Rapid population growth may have eroded that advantage.
• Economic decline. Worsening economic conditions during the structural adjustment era may have undermined nutrition.

The study did not analyse causes country by country, so these are regional hypotheses rather than a verdict on Angola specifically.

Childhoods shaped by war

Angola's own history gives context for its curve. The country became independent from Portugal in November 1975 and was almost immediately plunged into a civil war between the MPLA and UNITA that continued, with interruptions, until 2002. Every Angolan in the 1976 and 1996 birth cohorts spent their childhood during that conflict. We can't say from the NCD-RisC data how much of the decline was caused by the war, and the study itself didn't attempt to separate it out, but it is part of the backdrop to any interpretation of Angolan height trends.

What Angola's national survey shows

Angola's most recent national health survey is the Inquérito de Indicadores Múltiplos e de Saúde (IIMS) 2023–2024, conducted by the national statistics institute with the international Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program. It measured the height and weight of adult women and men and of young children.

The survey doesn't publish an average height, but it reports how many adults are shorter than 145 cm, a threshold used to flag women at higher risk of obstructed labor:

• 2 percent of women aged 20 to 49 were under 145 cm.
• 0.7 percent of men were under 145 cm.
• Among adolescent girls aged 15 to 19, 9 percent were classed as short for their age.

Short stature among adult women is therefore uncommon, but not evenly distributed:

Women in rural areas were twice as likely as urban women to be under 145 cm, and women in the poorest households about three times as likely as those in the richest.

The provincial pattern for adult women doesn't map neatly onto the pattern for children. Bié has the highest child stunting rate in the country (see below) but only 2.5 percent of its women are under 145 cm, while Uíge has the highest share of short women. Adult height reflects conditions twenty to forty years ago, during the war years, while child growth reflects conditions today, so the two maps describe different moments in the country's history. Small provincial samples also make the adult percentages less precise than the national figure.

Child growth: the clearest warning sign

Adult height is the end result of growth during childhood and adolescence, so the share of young children who are stunted (too short for their age compared with WHO growth standards) is a leading indicator of future adult height.

In Angola that indicator hasn't improved. DHS data show 37.6 percent of children under five were stunted in 2015–16 and 39.9 percent in 2023–24. The latest survey reveals large gaps:

• Rural children: 50.9 percent stunted, against 30.9 percent in towns and cities.
• Poorest households: 52.5 percent, against 23.3 percent in the richest.
• By province: 56.5 percent in Bié and 53.2 percent in Cuanza Sul, compared with 23.6 percent in Luanda.

Half of rural Angolan children being stunted is one of the strongest signs in the data that the country's height gains remain fragile. These children will become adults in the 2030s and 2040s, and their growth today will shape the national average then.

Are young Angolans getting taller?

There is some good news in more recent modelling. In 2020, NCD-RisC published a separate analysis of the height of school-age children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019. Its country data put 19-year-old Angolans in 2019 at about 168.5 cm for young men and 158.1 cm for young women, compared with 166.7 cm and 156.8 cm for 19-year-olds in 1985.

That suggests the decline seen in the adult cohort series has at least stopped, and that the generation who turned 19 in 2019, born around 2000, is a little taller than people born in the mid-1990s. On that measure Angolan young men rank 159th of 200 and young women 155th.

The two NCD-RisC series use different data and models, so they shouldn't be spliced together into a single trend line. But they're consistent on the broad picture: Angolan height is now roughly where it was for people born in the 1950s and 1970s, not dramatically higher.

Angola and its neighbors

Angola sits almost exactly in the middle of its immediate neighbors. Its men are within a centimeter of men in the Republic of the Congo, Namibia, DR Congo and Zambia. Its women are 2 cm taller than women in DR Congo, but 1.5 cm shorter than Namibian women.

The comparison with the Portuguese-speaking world is more striking, because the ranking flipped over the century:

Angolan men born in 1896, 1926 and 1956 were taller than Portuguese men of the same cohorts, and only a centimeter or so behind Brazilians. From the 1976 cohort onward the lines crossed. Portugal and Brazil kept rising while Angola stalled and then fell, so that by 1996 Angolan men were 5.6 cm shorter than Portuguese men and 6.3 cm shorter than Brazilians. For women, Portugal is now 5.7 cm and Brazil 3.6 cm taller.

This crossover mirrors the wider shift NCD-RisC described: at the start of the 20th century, many African populations had a height advantage over Asian and some European ones, and over the following decades that advantage was reversed or diminished as other regions kept growing and much of sub-Saharan Africa did not.

What these numbers mean for an individual

An average is the center of a wide spread, and it says nothing about whether a particular person is healthy. Many Angolan men are taller than 175 cm and many are shorter than 160 cm. To see where a specific height falls, try the height percentile calculator, and for unit conversions see 168 cm in feet.

For parents, the relevant measure is a child's growth over time on a proper growth chart, not the national average. If you're concerned that a child isn't growing as expected, a health worker or pediatrician can assess it.

To compare Angola with any other country, see the full average height by country table.