Average Height in Guatemala (Men & Women)

Guatemala's average height

Guatemala appears at the bottom of the world height tables, and it has been there for a century. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates used on this site, Guatemalan men born in 1996 average 163.4 cm (5′4″) and Guatemalan women 149.4 cm (4′11″). Men rank 189th of 200 countries. Women rank 200th, the shortest in the world.

The NCD-RisC paper in eLife (2016) is explicit: women born in 1996 are shortest in Guatemala, at 149.4 cm (credible interval 148.0–150.8), and shorter than 151 cm in only three other countries, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal. It also found that the shortest people anywhere in its century of data were Guatemalan women born in 1896, at 140.3 cm, the height of a well-nourished 10-year-old girl by today's international growth standards.

Each value describes a birth cohort: Guatemalans born in a given year, measured as adults. In this series the cohort view shows how early the stall began. Men born in 1956 averaged 163.1 cm and men born in 1996 averaged 163.4 cm, so forty years of births produced almost no change. To see how any height compares with Guatemalan averages, use the height percentile calculator.

Short stature in Guatemala is not a curiosity. Our World in Data explains that adult height reflects nutrition and illness in early life, and that stunting, which usually develops in the first two years, is a key marker of childhood malnutrition. Guatemala's height figures are a record of very high rates of stunting over many decades.

A century of change

Guatemalan men gained 9.5 cm across the century and women 9.1 cm. Almost all of it came before the 1956 cohort. Since then, men's height has moved by less than a centimeter and women's by half a centimeter.

The NCD-RisC paper also notes that Guatemalan men born in 1896 were among the three shortest male populations of their time, after Laos and Timor-Leste. Men gained enough to leave the very bottom, but women did not.

The roughly 14 cm gap between men and women is similar to what is seen in tall, well-fed countries. Short stature in Guatemala affects both sexes, not mainly women.

What the national health survey shows

Guatemala's Ministry of Public Health, its National Statistics Institute and ICF carried out the Encuesta Nacional de Salud Materno Infantil (ENSMI) 2014–2015, part of the international Demographic and Health Surveys program. It measured the height of 24,158 women aged 15 to 49.

The average was 149.3 cm, almost exactly the NCD-RisC estimate, and 25.3% of women were shorter than 145 cm, a common threshold for short maternal stature.

The pattern is consistent: women with more schooling and more household wealth are taller, by about 7 cm between the extremes. Age made little difference. Women aged 15 to 19 averaged 149.5 cm and women aged 40 to 49 averaged 148.8 cm, which fits NCD-RisC's finding that height has barely changed across recent generations.

Regional differences

Height also varies sharply by place. Urban women averaged 150.6 cm and rural women 148.1 cm. The gap between regions is larger still:

Women in Guatemala City are on average 6.6 cm taller than women in Sololá, and nearly half the women in Sololá, Totonicapán and Quiché are under 145 cm. At the level of the survey's eight regions, the lowest averages are in the Northwest (146.5 cm), the North (147.8 cm) and the Southwest (147.9 cm), while the Metropolitan region (151.5 cm), the Southeast (151.0 cm), the Northeast (150.9 cm) and Petén (150.5 cm) are noticeably taller. The ethnicity breakdown in the same survey shows a similar divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women, so geography, ethnicity, schooling and household wealth all overlap in these figures.

Why the 145 cm threshold matters

Surveys track women under 145 cm because maternal height is a marker of a mother's own early-life nutrition, and it is linked to the growth of her children. The ENSMI report includes a breakdown of mothers under 145 cm by education for exactly this reason. Dewey and Begum's 2011 review lists maternal reproductive outcomes among the long-term consequences of stunting, which is one way short stature can pass from one generation to the next even when it is not genetic.

A slow improvement

Earlier DHS surveys in Guatemala allow a rough trend for the share of very short women:

The proportion of women under 145 cm fell by about a fifth over 20 years. That is real progress, but at that pace Guatemala will take decades to reach the levels of its neighbors.

Childhood stunting today

The ENSMI 2014–2015 found that 46.5% of children under 5 were stunted, meaning their height for age was more than two standard deviations below the World Health Organization standard. That was only three percentage points lower than in the 2008–2009 survey. About 17% were severely stunted.

The survey report breaks the figure down:

• By age: stunting peaked at 18–23 months (55%) and 24–47 months (51%), and was lowest at 0–2 months (27%).
• By ethnicity: 58% of Indigenous children were stunted, against 34% of non-Indigenous children.
• By wealth: 66% in the poorest fifth of households, against 17% in the richest.
• By mother's education: 67% when the mother had no schooling, against 19% when she had higher education.
• By birth spacing: 57% when the previous birth was less than 24 months earlier, against 40% when the gap was 48 months or more.

WHO modeled estimates show stunting falling from 53.2% in 2000 to 44.6% in 2024, still among the highest rates in the world. The age pattern in the survey matches what Our World in Data describes: stunting builds up mostly in the first two years of life.

Evidence that environment, not genes, is the main cause

Two well-known studies make the case that Guatemala's short stature is largely environmental.

Maya children in the United States

Large numbers of Maya families migrated from Guatemala to the United States between the late 1970s and early 1990s. In 1999 and 2000, anthropologist B. Bogin and colleagues measured 431 Maya American children aged 5 to 12 and compared them with 1,347 Maya children living in Guatemala measured in 1998. The Maya American children were on average 11.54 cm taller and had legs 6.83 cm longer. The authors concluded that both height and body proportions are sensitive indicators of the environment for growth. A change that large in one generation cannot be genetic.

The INCAP nutrition trial

From 1969 to 1977, the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) ran a nutrition intervention in Guatemalan villages. Follow-up studies in 1988–1989 and 2002–2004, reviewed by R. Martorell and colleagues in the Journal of Nutrition in 2010, found that:

• Adults who had received improved nutrition through age 3 had larger body size and greater work capacity.
• Women who received it had more schooling, and both men and women scored higher on reading and intelligence tests.
• Men who received improved nutrition through age 2 earned 46% higher wages.

A 2011 review by K. G. Dewey and K. Begum in Maternal & Child Nutrition described the Guatemala follow-up as key evidence that stunting can have long-term effects on cognitive development, schooling, economic productivity and the health of the next generation.

Guatemalan teenagers in the global ranking

NCD-RisC's 2020 study in The Lancet tracked school-aged children and adolescents in 200 countries up to 2019. Guatemalan 19-year-old girls were the shortest in the world at 150.9 cm, followed by girls in Bangladesh, Nepal and Timor-Leste. The study noted that 19-year-old girls in those four countries had the same average height as 11-year-old Dutch girls, a gap of about eight years of growth.

The paper also observed that countries at the very bottom of the ranking, including Guatemala, stayed there from school age through late adolescence rather than catching up.

Guatemala and its neighbors

Guatemala trails every neighbor by a wide margin: 5.6 cm behind Mexico for men and 7.4 cm for women. A century ago the gap with Mexico's women was only 3.2 cm, so Guatemala has fallen further behind over time. El Salvador, whose women were almost as short as Guatemala's in 1896, gained 13.3 cm compared with Guatemala's 9.1 cm.

For other countries near the bottom of the world table, see Bangladesh and Nepal.

What these heights mean

An average Guatemalan woman at 149.4 cm is just under 4′11″, and an average man at 163.4 cm is about 5′4½″. A woman of 157 cm (5′2″) would be well above average in Guatemala, and a man of 170 cm (5′7″) would stand 6.6 cm above the national average, about the height of the average man in neighboring El Salvador. Compare that height with other countries on the 150 cm page.

Guatemala shows how persistent poor nutrition in early childhood can hold back the height of a whole population for generations, and how quickly children can grow taller when conditions change. Compare Guatemala with any other country in the average height hub.