Average Height in Colombia (Men & Women)

How tall Colombians are

Colombian men born in 1996 average 169.5 cm (5′6½″) and Colombian women 156.9 cm (5′2″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates this site uses for every country. Colombia ranks 117th of 200 countries for men and 144th for women, close to Mexico and a little shorter than Venezuela and Brazil.

Those rankings hide a remarkable record of improvement. Colombians born in 1896 averaged just 157.3 cm for men and 144.0 cm for women, so the country added more than 12 cm to both sexes over a century. And thanks to an unusual source, the national citizenship card, Colombia has one of the most complete height records in the world. This guide looks at the current averages, the century of growth, what more than eight million citizenship records reveal, regional differences, and how Colombia compares with its neighbors.

What the averages represent

NCD-RisC's 2016 study in eLife combined 1,472 population-based data sources with measured height for more than 18.6 million adults. It estimated mean height at age 18 for people born every year from 1896 to 1996, in 200 countries and territories, using only measured heights.

Each number describes a birth cohort. The headline figures describe Colombians born in 1996, who reached adulthood around 2014. Older Colombians are shorter on average, since they grew up when nutrition and health were worse, so an average of all adults today would be lower.

A century of growth

Over the century, men gained 12.2 cm and women 12.9 cm in the NCD-RisC series. The fastest growth came in the first half of the period: about 5 cm in each of the 30-year steps from 1896 to 1956. After that the pace slowed, to 1.9 cm for men between 1956 and 1976 and 0.7 cm between 1976 and 1996. The NCD-RisC paper notes that height is still rising in many Latin American countries, though in Colombia the most recent gains are small.

Eight million citizenship cards

Colombia's own historical data come from an unexpected place. In a paper for the Banco de la República, economists Adolfo Meisel and Margarita Vega analyzed height records from the cédula de ciudadanía, the national citizenship card. Colombia introduced the cédula in 1934 for men over 21, and a new version issued from 1952 recorded each citizen's photograph, fingerprint, height, skin color and birthplace. Women first received the document in 1956, after gaining the right to vote. In 1975, when the voting age dropped to 18, the card began to be issued at that age.

Using the full database held by the national registry, the authors worked with 8,454,348 records for Colombians born between 1910 and 1984. For people born around 1980, the records covered almost 95% of each birth year. Unlike military records, which cover only men and are often cut off by minimum height rules, the cédula data include women and reach almost the whole population.

Checking the data

A database this large raises obvious questions about quality, and the authors tested several. Because the card began to be issued at 18 instead of 21 from 1975, some young people might have been registered before they finished growing, which could create an artificial break in the series. A statistical test for structural breaks found none, for men or for women. The authors also checked one birth year per decade for a normal distribution of heights, as expected in a healthy, unselected population, and the test was passed in every case.

Meisel and Vega were not the first to use the cédula. An earlier study by Antonio Ordóñez and Doris Polanía drew a sample of 14,103 cards (8,264 men and 5,839 women) for people born between 1900 and 1972 and found gains of 7.0 cm for men and 8.7 cm for women. The newer work used the entire database rather than a sample and linked the results to economic and social change.

What the records show

Men born in 1980 to 1984 were 7.17 cm taller than those born in 1910 to 1914, and women 7.86 cm taller, an increase of roughly one centimeter per decade. Meisel and Vega called this "a remarkable achievement by international standards," comparing it with Japan's growth during its rapid industrialization. Men were always at least 11 cm taller than women across the whole period.

The cédula figures for early cohorts are higher than the NCD-RisC estimates, and the figures for the most recent cohorts are slightly higher too: 170.64 cm for men born in 1980 to 1984, against 169.5 cm in NCD-RisC for men born in 1996. The two studies use different data and methods, and the cédula paper doesn't describe how heights were taken at registration, so the exact values shouldn't be expected to match. Both agree on the direction and rough size of the change.

Why Colombians grew taller

Meisel and Vega point to Colombia's economic record: GDP per person grew by 2.3% a year from 1905 to 2000, one of the highest rates in Latin America. They identify several channels through which growth translated into height.

Less physical strain in childhood. In the early 20th century most Colombians worked in agriculture, and in a late-19th-century census most children older than eight were part of the labor force. Over the century, more jobs moved into industry and services, education expanded, and laws restricted child labor.

Better health. Mortality fell throughout the century. The authors highlight the control of tropical diseases: the last urban yellow fever epidemic was recorded in 1929, in Socorro, Santander, after eradication campaigns supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the government began vaccinating against yellow fever in 1937.

Better food. In 1893, a physician recorded the daily diet of rural laborers near Bogotá: 3.5 kg of chicha (a fermented maize drink), 600 g of maize porridge, 360 g of bread and 40 g of chocolate. In the 1930s, working-class families spent about two-thirds of their income on food, 63.5% in Medellín and 65.6% in Bogotá. Later, the industrialization of poultry farming made chicken and eggs much cheaper, and chicken consumption rose from 2.7 kg per person a year in 1950 to 15.3 kg in 1998.

The authors ruled out a change in ethnic makeup as a cause, since Colombia received very little immigration during the century. This is consistent with Our World in Data's summary of the evidence: changes in average height over generations reflect nutrition and health, because gene pools change slowly.

Children below their potential

The paper cites FAO figures on Colombian children whose height was below their potential because of malnutrition: 31.9% in 1965, 22.4% in 1977, 16.6% in 1986, 15.0% in 1995 and 13.5% in 2000. More recent survey data continue the story. Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) found 19.6% of children under 5 were stunted in 1995 and 13.2% in 2010. World Bank figures put stunting at 25.7% in 1986, 16.0% in 2005 and 12.7% in 2016.

The 1970s setback

Only one five-year group in the cédula data got shorter than the one before it: people born in 1970 to 1974. The drop was tiny, 0.09 cm for men and 0.13 cm for women, but Meisel and Vega found it puzzling, because GDP and farm output were growing and income inequality was falling in those years.

They offered two explanations. First, from the 1970s the price of food rose faster than other prices for nearly two decades, a total relative increase of 71.1%. Children born in the early 1970s grew up during that squeeze. Second, when inflation sped up in the early 1970s, urban workers' wages fell behind, partly because unions negotiated raises for two-year periods; this changed around 1975, when raises became annual. Growth resumed strongly for the 1975 to 1979 cohort.

The authors also stressed what did not stop the trend. Average height rose through the century despite cycles of political and criminal violence and periods of growing income inequality.

A country of many heights

Colombia is divided by three ranges of the Andes, and its regions differ in economy, culture and ethnic history. The cédula records allow comparisons by department of birth. For people born in 1984:

San Andrés is a group of Caribbean islands about 180 km off the coast of Nicaragua, historically home to an Afro-Caribbean, English-speaking, Protestant population quite different from mainland Colombia. Nariño, in the Andean south on the border with Ecuador, had the shortest averages, about six centimeters below San Andrés for both sexes.

The spread of heights within the population also narrowed. The coefficient of variation for women's height fell from 0.054 for those born in the early 1910s to 0.038 in the early 1980s, and for men from 0.045 to 0.038. The authors read this as a fairer distribution of biological well-being, though men's height dispersion rose between the 1950s and early 1970s, a period when income distribution worsened.

Women and short stature

DHS surveys also track the share of women aged 15 to 49 who are shorter than 145 cm (4′9″), a standard short-stature indicator in these surveys. In Colombia this share fell from 5.4% in 1995 and 5.5% in 2000 to 3.7% in 2005 and 3.5% in 2010. It's a small group, but the decline matches the rise in average height among women born in the second half of the century.

Colombia and its neighbors

Colombia sits in the middle of northern South America. Colombian men are 2.1 cm shorter than Venezuelan men and 4.1 cm shorter than Brazilian men, but 2.4 cm taller than Ecuadorian men and 4.3 cm taller than Peruvian men. Colombia and Mexico are almost identical, within half a centimeter for both sexes. The pattern within Colombia echoes the pattern across its borders: Nariño, the shortest department, borders Ecuador, which is shorter than Colombia overall.

Putting the numbers to use

An average Colombian man born in 1996 is about 5′6½″, a little below the 170 cm page on this site, and an average Colombian woman about 5′2″. Older Colombians are shorter: men born in 1956 averaged 166.9 cm in the NCD-RisC series.

To compare yourself with Colombian men or women born in 1996, use the height percentile calculator. For the full list of 200 countries, see the average height hub.