Average Height in Côte d'Ivoire (Men & Women)

How tall are people in Côte d'Ivoire?

Ivorian men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 166.5 cm (5′6″), and Ivorian women 158.1 cm (5′2″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the canonical values for Côte d'Ivoire on this site, used in the height comparison tool and in the average height by country table.

The two sexes sit in quite different places in the world table. Among 200 countries and territories, Ivorian men rank 164th, in the bottom fifth, while Ivorian women rank 122nd, closer to the middle. The difference between men and women is only 8.4 cm, which is among the ten narrowest gaps in our dataset and far below the global average of about 12 cm.

A century ago, Ivorians were taller than much of the world. Women born in 1896 ranked 54th and men 87th. By 1996, both had fallen far down the table, because Ivorian height not only stopped rising but went into reverse.

Birth cohorts and how they're estimated

NCD-RisC presents height by year of birth. The 1996 value is the expected average height at age 18 of Ivorians born in 1996. That's a cleaner comparison across generations than a single survey of all adults, which mixes people born decades apart.

The 2016 NCD-RisC study pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured height on more than 18.6 million people, covering 200 countries and birth years from 1896 to 1996. It accepted only measured height and used a statistical model that weighted national surveys more heavily than local ones and borrowed strength from similar countries where data were sparse. The authors caution that uncertainty is wider where data were limited. Our World in Data publishes the full series as an interactive chart.

A century of Ivorian height

Through the first half of the series, Ivorians grew steadily taller, by 6.9 cm for both men and women between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts. Women reached 160.4 cm with the 1956 cohort, which would still rank in the top half of the world today. Men peaked with the 1976 cohort at 169.9 cm.

Then height fell. By the 1996 cohort, men had lost 3.4 cm and women 2.3 cm. The fall for men is the ninth largest from peak in our dataset of 200 countries and territories. Over the full century, the net gain is just 3.9 cm for men and 4.6 cm for women.

Because men lost more than women, the gap between them shrank from 9.9 cm in the 1976 cohort to 8.4 cm in 1996. That's the opposite of what happened in most countries, where NCD-RisC found that by the 1996 cohort the male–female difference had settled at roughly 12 cm almost everywhere.

Part of the sub-Saharan reversal

The NCD-RisC paper found that in many sub-Saharan African countries, adult height decreased or at best remained the same for people born after the early 1960s, in some cases by about 5 cm from the peak. Côte d'Ivoire's curve is a clear example.

The authors put forward several possible explanations for the regional pattern, based on earlier research:

• Childhood stunting rose across sub-Saharan Africa until the mid-1990s, and this adversity in early life may have carried into adult height.
• An early dietary advantage may have faded. At the start of the 20th century, African populations were taller than many Asian ones, possibly thanks to more diverse diets and lower population density. Rising population may have undermined that.
• Economic decline, including during the structural adjustment era, may have hurt nutrition.

The study didn't attribute causes to individual countries, so these should be read as regional hypotheses rather than a diagnosis of Côte d'Ivoire.

Conflict in the 2000s

Côte d'Ivoire's recent history is relevant background for its youngest cohorts. A military rebellion in September 2002 began the First Ivorian Civil War, which ended with a peace agreement in March 2007. A second conflict broke out in 2011 after the disputed 2010 presidential election. People born in 1996 were small children and adolescents during the first war. The NCD-RisC data can't separate the effect of the conflict from other factors, but it is part of the picture for anyone interpreting the trend.

Young Ivorians: no rebound yet

NCD-RisC's 2020 Lancet analysis of the height of children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 offers a more recent view. Its country data estimate that 19-year-old Ivorians in 2019 averaged about 168.2 cm for young men and 158.7 cm for young women. For 19-year-olds in 1985, the figures were 169.2 cm and 159.2 cm.

That's a further small decline of 1.0 cm for young men and 0.5 cm for young women over 34 years, at a time when many countries' adolescents were getting taller. On that measure, young Ivorian men rank 164th of 200 and young women 143rd. The 2020 study used different data and a different model from the 2016 adult series, so the two shouldn't be combined into one line, but neither shows any recovery.

Côte d'Ivoire isn't alone in this. The same 2020 dataset shows young men's height falling slightly between 1985 and 2019 in several neighboring countries too:

Young women in most of these countries were roughly flat or slightly taller. Across this part of West Africa, then, the youngest adults are at best holding steady. That is a sharp contrast with countries such as China, where 19-year-old men gained about 8 cm over the same period in the NCD-RisC data.

What the national surveys show

Côte d'Ivoire's Enquête Démographique et de Santé (EDS), run by the national statistics institute with the international DHS program, has measured women's height in 1994, 1998–99, 2011–12 and 2021.

Very few short women

The surveys report the share of women shorter than 145 cm, a threshold used to identify a higher risk of difficult childbirth. In the 2021 report, which applies the measure to women aged 20 to 49, only about 1 percent were under 145 cm. The DHS series has hardly moved:

The 2021 rate was low everywhere: 0.8 percent in urban areas and 0.9 percent in rural areas, 1.2 percent in the poorest fifth of households and 0.6 percent in the richest. So while average height has fallen, very short stature among adult women remains rare. That's consistent with the relatively high average height of Ivorian women, 158.1 cm, compared with many African and Asian countries.

Child stunting: a long plateau, then progress

The share of children under five who are stunted, too short for their age compared with WHO growth standards, is the most important leading indicator of adult height. Côte d'Ivoire's record has two phases:

For nearly two decades, about three in ten young children were stunted. Only in the most recent survey did the rate fall meaningfully, to 23.4 percent. The children born in the 1990s and early 2000s, who grew up during the long plateau, are the young adults of today, which helps make sense of the absence of any rebound in adolescent height.

The 2021 survey also shows a strong regional and economic divide:

Children in Zanzan, Woroba or Montagnes were more than twice as likely to be stunted as those in Abidjan. These differences in early growth are likely to show up as regional differences in adult height in the years ahead.

Côte d'Ivoire and its neighbors

Ivorian men are shorter than men in every neighboring country except Liberia: 4.6 cm shorter than Malians, 2.8 cm shorter than men from Burkina Faso and 2.3 cm shorter than Ghanaians. Ivorian women, by contrast, are slightly taller than women in Ghana and Guinea, and only about 2 cm shorter than women in the Sahel countries to the north. That contrast between men and women is unusual and reflects the narrow gap between the sexes discussed above.

Why height is tracked at all

NCD-RisC treats average height as an indicator of public health. Taller adult height is associated with longer life and lower risks of heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease, as well as fewer complications in pregnancy, though also with a higher risk of some cancers. Because differences between countries are thought to come mainly from environmental factors, especially nutrition and infection in childhood and the mother's health during pregnancy, a country's height trend is a long-run record of how well its children have fared.

Interpreting the averages

Some context from the global table helps. Ivorian men born in 1996 are exactly level with men in Zambia (166.5 cm) and slightly shorter than men in Egypt and South Africa (both 166.7 cm). Ivorian women, at 158.1 cm, are taller than women in Nigeria (156.3 cm) and India (152.6 cm), and level with women in Japan (158.3 cm). In other words, the same country can look short or average depending on whether you compare its men or its women, which is a direct consequence of the narrow gap between the sexes.

An average marks the middle of a population. Many Ivorian men are taller than 175 cm, and many women are shorter than 150 cm. National averages say nothing about an individual's health. To see where a specific height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 166 cm to feet and inches.

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