Average Height in Cameroon (Men & Women)

Average height in Cameroon

Cameroonian men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 167.8 cm (5′6″), and Cameroonian women 158.8 cm (5′3″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the canonical values for Cameroon on this site, in the height comparison tool and in the average height by country table.

Cameroon's men and women sit in noticeably different places in the world table. Among 200 countries and territories, men rank 138th and women 102nd, almost in the middle. The gap between them is just 9.0 cm, three centimeters narrower than the global average of about 12 cm for the 1996 cohort.

The "1896" row is the surprising one. A century ago, Cameroonians were taller than most of the world. Women born in 1896 ranked 47th of 200, comfortably in the top quarter. Since then, Cameroon has slid down the rankings, first because its gains slowed, and then because its height went into reverse.

Cameroon is also one of the few sub-Saharan African countries with a large, published survey of measured adult height that breaks the results down by age, which lets us check the NCD-RisC trend against direct measurements.

How the estimates work

NCD-RisC reports height by year of birth. The 1996 value is the expected height at age 18 of people born that year. A survey of all adults would instead mix together several generations, including older people who have lost some height with age.

The 2016 study behind these figures pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured height on more than 18.6 million people, for 200 countries and birth years from 1896 to 1996. It accepted only measured height, never self-reports, and used a statistical model that weighted national data more heavily than local studies. Where data were limited, the model borrowed from similar countries and the region, and the uncertainty is wider. The series is also published as an interactive chart on Our World in Data.

A century of Cameroonian height

For the first sixty years of the series, Cameroonians grew steadily taller: men gained 7.4 cm and women 7.5 cm between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts. Women born in 1956 averaged 161.3 cm, a height that would rank about 70th of 200 countries for the 1996 cohort.

Then the trend turned. Women's height peaked with the 1956 cohort and men's with the 1976 cohort, and by 1996 both had fallen: men by 3.4 cm and women by 2.5 cm. The fall for men is among the ten largest from peak in our dataset. Over the whole century, Cameroonian men gained a net 4.3 cm and women 5.0 cm, compared with gains of 15 to 20 cm in countries such as South Korea and Iran.

The gap between men and women has always been narrow in Cameroon, under 10.5 cm throughout. It shrank further, to 9.0 cm, in the 1996 cohort because men lost more height than women.

Part of a sub-Saharan pattern

The NCD-RisC paper's best-known African finding is that adult height decreased or at best stayed the same in many sub-Saharan countries for people born after the early 1960s, in some places by around 5 cm from the peak. Cameroon follows that pattern.

The authors discussed possible explanations, drawing on earlier research: a rise in childhood stunting in sub-Saharan Africa that continued until the mid-1990s and may have carried through to adult height; the loss of an early dietary advantage, possibly related to more varied diets and lower population density a century ago, as populations grew; and worsening economic conditions during the structural adjustment era. They didn't analyse causes country by country, so these are regional hypotheses rather than conclusions about Cameroon.

What measured surveys in Cameroon show

The 2003 urban survey

In 2003, the Cameroon Burden of Diabetes Baseline Survey measured adults in four urban districts: Yaoundé, Douala, Garoua and Bamenda. It followed the WHO's stepwise (STEPS) approach for population-based surveys of cardiovascular risk factors and included 10,011 people aged 15 and over from 4,189 households. Its results were published in BMC Public Health in 2006.

The measurement protocol was careful. Height was recorded to the nearest 0.5 cm on portable, locally manufactured stadiometers, with participants standing upright and barefoot on a flat surface, heels and the back of the head against the board.

The survey found average heights of 170.6 cm for men and 161.3 cm for women, and reported that men were about 10 cm taller than women at every age. Breaking the results down by age group shows something interesting:

In most countries, younger adults are taller than older ones, because each generation grew up in better conditions. In urban Cameroon in 2003, the tallest group was people aged 35 to 44, born roughly between 1959 and 1968. Adults aged 15 to 34, born roughly between 1969 and 1988, were 1.6 cm shorter for men and 0.7 cm shorter for women. Some of that may be chance, and some young people at the bottom of the age range may still have been growing, but the pattern lines up with the NCD-RisC finding that Cameroonians born after the 1950s to 1970s were getting shorter.

Bear in mind that this was an urban survey. Cameroon's national health surveys show that urban children are far less likely to be stunted than rural children (19.8 percent against 36.2 percent in 2018), so it's no surprise that measured urban adults are taller than the national NCD-RisC estimates. The urban averages, 170.6 cm for men and 161.3 cm for women, are close to the NCD-RisC peaks for the 1956 and 1976 cohorts, the generations that made up most of the survey's older age groups.

The survey's main purpose was to measure obesity, and it found more than a quarter of urban men and almost half of urban women overweight or obese. That's a reminder that falling or stalled height and rising weight can happen in the same population at the same time, a combination NCD-RisC also noted when it found that changes in height and in body mass index were largely unrelated across countries.

The national health surveys

Cameroon's Enquête Démographique et de Santé (EDS), run by the national statistics institute with the international DHS program, measures women's height and reports the share shorter than 145 cm, a threshold used to identify a higher risk of difficult childbirth. That share has always been low:

In the 2018 survey, the highest regional rates were in the Sud-Ouest (4.4 percent) and the Est (2.8 percent), and the lowest in the Nord (0.1 percent) and Yaoundé (0.2 percent). Very short stature among adult women is rare, consistent with the relatively tall average for Cameroonian women.

Child stunting: slow progress, sharp divides

The share of children who are stunted, too short for their age compared with WHO growth standards, is the best predictor of where adult height is heading. Cameroon's DHS surveys show stunting rising in the 1990s and then easing slowly:

The rise between 1991 and 1998 fits the regional increase in child stunting that NCD-RisC cited, which continued until the mid-1990s. Cameroonians born around 1996, the last cohort in the adult series, were young children at the peak.

The 2018 survey reveals wide gaps:

• Nord region: 41.3 percent stunted; Extrême-Nord and Est: 37.3 percent each; Adamaoua: 34.6 percent.
• Douala: 8.9 percent; Yaoundé: 11.3 percent.
• Rural areas: 36.2 percent, against 19.8 percent in towns and cities.
• Poorest fifth of households: 40.4 percent, against 9.1 percent in the richest.

A child in the poorest households was more than four times as likely to be stunted as one in the richest.

Young Cameroonians today

NCD-RisC's 2020 analysis in The Lancet modelled the height of children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019. Its country data estimate that 19-year-old Cameroonians in 2019 averaged about 172.1 cm for young men and 160.4 cm for young women, compared with 171.6 cm and 160.4 cm in 1985.

Those figures are higher than the 1996 cohort values in the 2016 series, a difference that reflects newer data and a different model, so the two shouldn't be joined into one trend. What both suggest is that there has been no strong rebound: young Cameroonian adults are about as tall as young adults were in the mid-1980s. On the 2020 measure, young men rank 112th of 200 and young women 106th.

Cameroon and its neighbors

Cameroon is almost identical to Gabon and sits in the middle of Central Africa. Chad is the tallest of its neighbors, 2.6 cm taller for men. Nigeria is shorter, by 1.9 cm for men and 2.5 cm for women.

Why height is worth tracking

NCD-RisC treats average height as an indicator of how well a country has nourished its children. Taller adults tend to live longer and have lower risks of heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease, and taller women experience fewer complications in childbirth, though taller height also carries a higher risk of some cancers. Because differences between countries are thought to come mainly from environmental factors rather than genes, a falling height curve like Cameroon's is a signal about childhood conditions decades ago.

Interpreting the averages

An average sits in the middle of a broad distribution. Many Cameroonian men are taller than 180 cm and many women shorter than 150 cm, and national figures say nothing about an individual's health. To see where a specific height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 168 cm to feet and inches.

If you're concerned about a child's growth, a health worker or pediatrician can assess it using standard growth charts.