Average Height in Ghana (Men & Women)

How tall are Ghanaians?

Ghanaian men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 168.8 cm (5′6″), and Ghanaian women 157.9 cm (5′2″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). We use these values for Ghana across this site, including in the height comparison tool and the average height by country table.

That puts Ghana close to the middle of the world table: men rank 126th and women 127th among 200 countries and territories. The gap between men and women, 10.9 cm, is smaller than the roughly 12 cm global average for the 1996 cohort, a feature Ghana shares with many West African countries.

The two "rank" rows tell the main story. A century ago, Ghanaians were taller than average by world standards. Ghanaian women born in 1896 ranked 58th in the world, well inside the top third. By 1996, they had slipped to 127th. That's not because Ghanaians got dramatically shorter, but because their height stopped rising while most other countries kept growing.

What a birth-cohort average is

The NCD-RisC figures describe people by year of birth. The 1996 value is the expected adult height, at age 18, of people born in 1996. It is not the same as the average height of all Ghanaian adults today, which mixes several generations together.

To produce the estimates, NCD-RisC 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. Only measured height was used. A statistical model then combined the data, giving more weight to national surveys than to local studies and borrowing information from similar countries where national data were limited. The full series is available in an interactive chart on Our World in Data.

A century of Ghanaian height

The first sixty years show solid growth. Men born in 1956 were 6.7 cm taller than men born in 1896, and women 6.5 cm taller. Women then peaked with the 1956 cohort, and men with the 1976 cohort. By 1996, men were 1.7 cm below their peak and women 1.9 cm below theirs.

Across the whole century, Ghanaian men gained a net 6.4 cm and women 4.6 cm. That's modest by global standards: the biggest gains NCD-RisC recorded were 20.2 cm for South Korean women and 16.5 cm for Iranian men.

Part of a wider African pattern

Ghana's curve follows one of the most important findings of the NCD-RisC study. Across many sub-Saharan African countries, adult height decreased or at best stayed the same for people born after the early 1960s, in some places by around 5 cm from its peak. Ghana's decline is milder than that, closer to 2 cm.

The study's authors discussed several possible reasons for the regional reversal, drawing on earlier research:

• Child stunting in sub-Saharan Africa rose until the mid-1990s, and that childhood adversity may have carried into adult height.
• A century ago, African populations may have had an advantage from more diverse diets and lower population density, an advantage that rapid population growth may have eroded.
• Worsening economic conditions during the era of structural adjustment may have undermined nutrition.

The researchers didn't test these explanations country by country, so they're best read as regional hypotheses rather than a diagnosis of Ghana.

Why Ghana slipped down the world rankings

It's worth spelling out what the change in rank means, because it is easy to misread. Ghanaian women born in 1996 are 4.6 cm taller than Ghanaian women born in 1896. Yet their world rank fell from 58th to 127th. The explanation is that the rest of the world moved much faster.

NCD-RisC found that over the same century, South Korean women gained 20.2 cm and moved from the fifth-shortest women in the world into the top third. Large gains also occurred in Japan, Southern Europe and Central Europe, and China and Thailand were still growing for the latest cohorts. When dozens of countries add 10 to 20 cm and Ghana adds under 5 cm, Ghana falls down the table even though its own people became taller.

The NCD-RisC authors described this as a reversal, or at least a narrowing, of Africa's early height advantage over Asia, and they noted that the gap between the tallest and shortest countries did not shrink over the century: it stayed about 20 cm for women and widened for men. Ghana's position in the middle of the 1996 table is the product of both trends.

Why height is a useful health indicator

NCD-RisC chose to study height because it is linked to health throughout life. Taller adults tend to live longer and have lower risks of heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease, and taller mothers have fewer complications in pregnancy and childbirth, though greater height also carries a higher risk of some cancers. Because differences between countries come mainly from conditions in the womb and in childhood, the authors argue that adult height can serve as an indicator that summarises several dimensions of human development at once.

For Ghana, that makes the recent fall in child stunting, from almost a third of young children in 1993 to about one in six in 2022, the most hopeful number on this page.

What Ghana's health surveys show

Ghana's national Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), carried out by the Ghana Statistical Service with the international DHS program, have measured women's height in every round since at least 1993.

How the 2022 survey measured height

The 2022 report describes the protocol in detail. Height and weight were measured for eligible women aged 15 to 49 and for children under five, in half of the households selected for the men's survey. Height was taken on a ShorrBoard measuring board, with adults and children over two measured standing and younger children lying down. The 77 biomarker technicians trained for six days in the classroom, two days in communities and clinics and three days in the field, and every one of them passed formal standardisation exercises before collecting data. To check precision, one child per survey cluster was measured twice, and the DHS program treats a difference of under 1 cm between the two readings as acceptable.

That level of care matters, because a systematic error of even a centimeter or two would be as large as the entire change in Ghanaian height between the 1956 and 1996 cohorts.

Very few short adults

Recent DHS reports don't publish an average height, but they do report how many adults are shorter than 145 cm, a cut-off used to identify women at higher risk of difficult childbirth. The 2022 survey applies it to women aged 20 to 49. Ghana's figures are strikingly low:

Fewer than one woman in 200 was under 145 cm in 2022. By comparison, the same survey programme found 9.5 percent of women of childbearing age under 145 cm in Peru in 2012, and 9.5 percent in Nepal in 2022. Very short adult stature is rare in Ghana in every region: the 2022 figure ranged only from 0 percent in Upper West to about 1 percent in Upper East and Volta.

Child growth: steady progress, northern gaps

Adult height is shaped by growth in childhood, so the share of young children who are stunted (too short for their age by WHO standards) is the best indicator of where adult height is heading.

Ghana's record here is encouraging. In the DHS surveys, child stunting fell from 32.5 percent in 1993 to 28.0 percent in 2008, then sharply to 18.8 percent in 2014 and 17.4 percent in 2022.

But the 2022 survey also shows a clear divide between the north and the rest of the country:

Children in the Northern and North East regions were nearly three times as likely to be stunted as those in Greater Accra or the Eastern region. A child in the poorest fifth of households was three times as likely to be stunted as one in the richest. Those gaps in early growth are likely to translate into differences in adult height a generation from now, even though adult short stature is currently rare everywhere.

What about young Ghanaians?

In 2020, NCD-RisC published a separate analysis in The Lancet of the height of children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019. Its country data estimate that 19-year-old Ghanaian men averaged about 170.3 cm in 2019, exactly the same as in 1985, while young women rose slightly from 158.3 cm to 158.9 cm.

On that measure, young Ghanaian men rank 139th of 200 countries and young women 137th. The flat line for young men is a reminder that Ghana's height gains have stalled for decades, even as child stunting has fallen. The fall in stunting since 2008 is too recent to show up yet among 19-year-olds, who were born around 2000, so the next update of these figures will be an important test.

The 2016 and 2020 NCD-RisC analyses use different data and models, so their numbers shouldn't be strung together into a single trend. We keep the 2016 adult cohort figures as the headline because they cover every country on the same basis.

Ghana and its West African neighbors

Ghana borders Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north and Togo to the east.

Ghana sits in the middle of its region. Its men are taller than men in Togo, Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria, but shorter than men in the Sahel countries to the north. Ghanaian women are slightly shorter than women in Togo and Côte d'Ivoire and 2.3 cm shorter than women in Burkina Faso. Senegal, at the western tip of the region, has some of the tallest people in Africa in the NCD-RisC data, more than 4 cm taller than Ghanaians for both sexes.

Using these averages

Ghana's averages are midpoints, not limits: plenty of Ghanaian men exceed 180 cm and plenty of women stand under 150 cm, and a national mean says nothing about any one person's health. The height percentile calculator places a specific height within the distribution, and the 168 cm conversion gives the feet-and-inches equivalent.

If you're concerned about a child's growth, a nurse or pediatrician can track it on standard growth charts.