Average Height in Malawi (Men & Women)

How tall are Malawians?

Malawi has some of the shortest adults in the world, and its people have been getting shorter. The site's figures come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates that Malawians born in 1996 average 162.2 cm (5′4″) for men and 154.4 cm (5′1″) for women. In the site's table of 200 countries and territories, Malawian men rank 196th, and Malawian women rank 174th.

Those figures are the end point of a long arc. Malawians born in the 1950s were about 3 cm taller than today's young adults. In the NCD-RisC data, men born in 1956 averaged 165.5 cm, and women 157.1 cm. Since then, both have lost ground. The decline fits a pattern across much of sub-Saharan Africa that the NCD-RisC study highlighted, and it lines up with very high levels of child stunting in Malawi's surveys from the 1990s and 2000s.

The good news in Malawi's data is recent. Child stunting has fallen sharply since 2010, which suggests the generations now growing up may stop the decline.

How the estimates work

In Malawi's case, the cohort framing matters because the curve bends. Men born in 1956 averaged 165.5 cm at about age 18; those born in 1996, who turned 18 in 2014, averaged 162.2 cm, a loss of more than 3 cm. Both figures come from the same NCD-RisC model, built only on measured heights rather than self-reports, so the decline is not an artifact of people overstating their size.

A Bayesian hierarchical model combined each country's own data with information from other years and from other countries in the same region. When a country's data are limited, the model leans on its region and the estimates carry wider uncertainty, so differences of a centimeter between neighbors shouldn't be over-interpreted.

A century of rise and decline

Between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts, Malawian men gained 6.3 cm and women 5.7 cm. Then the gains stopped and reversed. Men born in 1996 are 3.3 cm shorter than men born in 1956, and women 2.7 cm shorter. The net century-long gain is just 3.0 cm for each sex, a third of the 8 to 9 cm global gain reported by Our World in Data. A Malawian man born in 1996 is about the same height as one born in 1926.

Why Malawi's adults are getting shorter

The NCD-RisC paper describes the pattern clearly: in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, adult height decreased or at best stayed the same for cohorts born after the early 1960s, by around 5 cm from its peak in some. The authors point to earlier research showing that child stunting rose across sub-Saharan Africa until the mid-1990s, and argue that this childhood adversity carried forward into adult height.

They also suggest that Africa's early height advantage over Asia may have come partly from a more diverse diet, helped by lower population density, and that rising population and worsening economic conditions during structural adjustment may have undermined it. These are regional explanations rather than a Malawi-specific analysis, but Malawi's child data, below, show exactly the kind of sustained childhood undernutrition the paper describes.

Our World in Data puts it simply: poor nutrition and illness in childhood limit human growth, so a population's average height tracks its living conditions while its children were growing up.

Child stunting: very high for decades, then falling

Malawi's National Statistical Office has run Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) since 1992. They measure children under five and report stunting, a height for age more than two standard deviations below the WHO growth standard.

The World Bank's series of stunting estimates shows how persistent the problem was:

For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, more than half of young Malawian children were stunted. Children born in those years are now adults, and they're the cohorts whose height NCD-RisC estimates were falling.

The 2015–16 survey

The 2015–16 Malawi DHS found that 37% of children under five were stunted, 3% were wasted, 12% were underweight and 5% were overweight. The report highlights that the greatest decrease in stunting since 1992 came between 2010 (47%) and 2015–16 (37%).

Stunting varied widely between groups:

Stunting increased with age and peaked at 42 to 45% among children aged 18 to 47 months. Over half of children who were reported to be very small at birth were stunted, and children of thin mothers were more likely to be stunted, wasted or underweight than children of mothers with a normal or higher body mass index.

How children were measured

The 2015–16 survey measured the weight and height of children under five in a one-third subsample of households. Height was measured on a Shorr measuring board, lying down for younger children (recumbent length) and standing for older children. A total of 6,033 children were eligible for measurement.

Women's height and weight

Short stature in 2010

The 2010 Malawi DHS reported the share of women aged 15 to 49 who were shorter than 145 cm, which it calls very short stature. The report explains that a woman's height is associated with her past socioeconomic status and with nutrition during childhood and adolescence, and that short stature and low pre-pregnancy weight are risk factors for poor birth outcomes and obstetric complications. Based on 7,547 women:

The report notes that short stature decreased with increasing education and wealth. A rate of 2.4% is low in absolute terms, but it's higher than in Sahel countries such as Mali or Burkina Faso, where well under 1% of women fall below 145 cm.

Weight is rising

The 2015–16 survey shows how Malawian women's weight is changing even as their height isn't. Seven percent of women were thin, with a body mass index below 18.5, while 21% were overweight or obese. The share of thin women was steady at 9% from 1992 to 2010 and then fell slightly, while overweight and obesity rose steadily from 10% in 1992 to 21% in 2015–16. In urban areas, 36% of women were overweight or obese, against 17% in rural areas.

A local survey of adults

The Wikipedia table of national height averages lists measured averages of 164.3 cm for men and 155.4 cm for women aged 25 to 64 from Malawi's 2009 national STEPS survey. Those adults were born between about 1945 and 1984, the cohorts for which NCD-RisC estimates men at 165.1 to 165.5 cm and women at 156.2 to 157.1 cm. The survey's figures are about 1 cm lower, a modest difference given the different methods.

Malawi and its neighbors

NCD-RisC estimates for Malawi and nearby countries (1996 birth cohort):

Malawian men are the shortest in this group, 2.6 cm below Tanzania and Mozambique and 6.4 cm below Zimbabwe. Malawian women are close to Mozambican women and about 1.5 cm below Tanzanian and Zambian women. All of these neighbors show a decline after the 1956 or 1976 cohort, but Malawi's is among the largest. For men, Tanzania and Zambia have each lost 2.8 cm since their 1956 peaks, Zimbabwe 2.7 cm since its 1976 peak, and Mozambique 1.9 cm since its 1976 peak, against Malawi's 3.3 cm. The similarity across the region suggests shared regional conditions are at work, which is also how the NCD-RisC authors frame these declines.

Three generations in one family

The reversal is easiest to picture across a family. On the NCD-RisC estimates, a typical Malawian man born in 1956 stood about 165.5 cm, close to 5′5″. His son, born around 1976, would be about the same height at 165.1 cm. A grandson born in 1996 would average 162.2 cm, about 5′4″: some 3 cm, or more than an inch, shorter than his grandfather. For women the pattern is the same, from 157.1 cm in the 1956 cohort to 154.4 cm in the 1996 cohort.

In the site's data, only about ten countries show a larger drop for men from their peak cohort to the 1996 cohort, including Mauritania, Yemen, Rwanda, Madagascar, Uganda, Egypt and Niger. Malawi's 3.3 cm decline places it just behind that group, and almost all of the countries with declines this large are in Africa.

The child data explain why this matters for the future as much as the past. The NCD-RisC authors argue that childhood adversity in sub-Saharan Africa carried forward into the adult heights they estimated, which is why the falling stunting rate since 2010 is the most hopeful number in Malawi's record.

A small gap between the sexes

Malawian men born in 1996 are only 7.8 cm taller than Malawian women, one of the smallest gaps in the site's data: only Gambia, Mauritania and Yemen have smaller gaps, and Sierra Leone's is the same. The global gap for that cohort is about 12 cm, using Our World in Data's averages of 171 cm for men and 159 cm for women. Malawian men are far below the world average, while Malawian women are less far below theirs.

What these numbers mean

An average Malawian man born in 1996 is 162.2 cm, about 5′4″, nearly 9 cm below the global average for men. An average woman is 154.4 cm, about 5′1″. To compare an individual height, try the height percentile calculator, or convert on the cm to feet page for 163 cm. The average height hub has all 200 countries.

Malawi's height record is a sobering one: three generations of gains in the first half of the twentieth century, erased for people born after the 1950s. The fall in child stunting from more than half of children to about a third gives real hope that the trend will turn, but it will be the 2030s before the adult heights of today's children can confirm it.