Average Height in Morocco (Men & Women)

How tall are Moroccans?

Men born in Morocco in 1996 reach an average adult height of 170.4 cm (5′7″), and women 157.8 cm (5′2″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the canonical figures for Morocco on this site and in the 3D height comparison tool.

Within our dataset of 200 countries and territories, that places Moroccan men 108th and Moroccan women 131st: close to the middle of the world distribution for men, a little below it for women. The gap between the sexes, 12.6 cm, is slightly wider than the roughly 12 cm global average for the 1996 cohort.

Morocco is an interesting case because three different kinds of evidence, all measured rather than self-reported, give slightly different answers. Understanding why tells you a lot about how height statistics work.

Birth cohorts, not snapshots

The NCD-RisC estimates are arranged by year of birth. The figure for 1996 is the expected average height at age 18 of people born in 1996, not the average height of every adult living in Morocco in a given year.

To produce those estimates, the collaboration pooled 1,472 population-based studies covering more than 18.6 million people worldwide, accepting only data where height was physically measured. A Bayesian model then estimated a smooth trend for each country, borrowing strength from neighbors and from the region when national data were thin, and giving more weight to national surveys than to local studies. The output is a consistent century-long series, born 1896 to 1996, for every country. Our World in Data publishes the same series as an interactive chart.

A century of Moroccan height

The early part of the century saw steep growth. Moroccan men born in 1956 were more than 10 cm taller than men born in 1896, and women gained over 7 cm. Then the curve levelled off. Men peaked with the 1976 cohort at 171.3 cm, and the 1996 cohort sits 0.9 cm lower. Women gained only 0.3 cm between 1956 and 1976 and then slipped by 0.6 cm.

Men's gains outpaced women's throughout. The male–female gap was 8.4 cm for those born in 1896 and 12.6 cm a century later, a widening that is unusual: NCD-RisC found that across countries men's and women's height changes were generally correlated, and that a century ago the gap tended to be larger, not smaller, in poorer populations.

The late-century dip echoes a wider regional pattern described in the NCD-RisC paper. The authors noted that in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa, such as Egypt and Yemen, men's height had stopped rising or fallen for the most recent cohorts, while in others, such as Iran, both sexes kept growing. Morocco's modelled dip is small, well within the uncertainty of the estimates, and, as the next sections show, it isn't supported by the more recent data.

What Morocco's own surveys show

The 2017–2018 national STEPS survey

Morocco carried out a national survey of risk factors for noncommunicable diseases in 2017–2018, using the World Health Organization's standardised STEPS method, which includes physical measurement of height and weight. As tabulated on Wikipedia's country height list, the survey measured 1,871 men and 3,390 women aged 18 and over and found average heights of about 171.8 cm for men and 159.2 cm for women.

Those all-ages averages are higher than the NCD-RisC 1996-cohort values (170.4 cm and 157.8 cm), even though they include older adults, who were shorter as young people and have lost some height with age. That's a hint that the youngest Moroccan adults are taller than the 2016 model suggests.

The 2003–2004 family health survey

The Enquête sur la Population et la Santé Familiale (EPSF) of 2003–2004, run by the health ministry with the international Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program, measured women of childbearing age. Its final report gives an average height of 158.5 cm for women aged 15 to 49, and finds that only about 1 percent were shorter than 145 cm, the cut-off health workers use to flag a higher risk of obstructed labor. The report adds that height did not differ significantly by socio-demographic characteristics such as residence or education.

The DHS program's data show that the share of women under 145 cm was 1.3 percent in the 1992 survey, so short stature among adult women was already rare a generation ago.

Childhood growth and regional differences

Adult height reflects the conditions of childhood, and Morocco's child-growth data show both progress and sharp regional contrasts. In the DHS surveys, the share of children under five who were stunted (too short for their age by WHO standards) fell from 29.9 percent in 1992 to 22.4 percent in 2003–04.

The 2003–04 survey also shows how unevenly that burden was spread:

Children in the poorest households were almost three times as likely to be stunted as those in the richest. Those children are now adults in their twenties and thirties, so the regional and wealth gaps in childhood growth are likely to be carried into adult height, even though the 2003–04 report found no significant difference by background among adult women of that time.

Young Moroccans are taller

In 2020, NCD-RisC published a separate analysis in The Lancet that tracked the height of children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019. Its country data estimate that 19-year-old Moroccans in 2019 averaged about 176.4 cm for young men and 161.2 cm for young women. In 1985, 19-year-olds averaged 172.4 cm and 157.2 cm. That's a gain of about 4 cm for both sexes in a little over three decades.

On that measure, Morocco's young men rank 55th of 200 countries and young women 95th, considerably higher than the 1996 birth-cohort rankings. The two series aren't directly comparable: the 2020 analysis used newer data, a model built for growth through childhood, and measured height at 19 in a given calendar year. But together with the 2017–2018 STEPS results, it points in one direction. Moroccan height is still rising, and the slight dip in the 2016 series is best treated as a modelling artifact of limited data for that period.

We keep the 2016 figures as the headline because they're available for every country on the same basis, which is what makes fair comparisons possible across this site. We've flagged the difference here rather than mix two incompatible series.

Morocco compared with its neighbors

Across the Maghreb, Moroccan men are level with Algerians and behind Tunisians and Libyans. Moroccan women are shorter than women in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Spain, Morocco's northern neighbor across the Strait of Gibraltar, is about 6 cm taller for both sexes in the 1996 cohort. Egypt and Mauritania are shorter for men and roughly level for women.

Given that the newer adolescent estimates for Morocco are about 6 cm higher for young men than the 1996 cohort value, the gap with Spain among today's young adults may be narrower than this table suggests.

Why height changes across generations

NCD-RisC stresses that while height is highly heritable within a population, differences between countries are thought to come mainly from environmental factors: the mother's own size and nutrition during pregnancy, and nutrition and infections during childhood and adolescence. Height therefore works as a long-run record of how well children were fed and kept healthy.

Morocco's rapid gains in the first half of the century, followed by a plateau and then renewed growth among recent cohorts of adolescents, are consistent with that interpretation. The falling rate of child stunting between 1992 and 2003–04 is the kind of change that should show up as taller young adults a couple of decades later, which is exactly what the 2020 adolescent series records.

Why measured height matters so much here

Morocco's evidence is unusually strong for a middle-income country because every source discussed on this page physically measured people. That's not a technicality. NCD-RisC deliberately excluded self-reported height, because people asked how tall they are tend to round up, and the error is large enough to distort comparisons between countries.

The three sources also measured different people, which explains most of the spread in their numbers:

• NCD-RisC 2016 models people born in a particular year, at age 18, and smooths the trend across decades.
• The 2017–2018 STEPS survey measured a sample of adults of every age from 18 upward at one moment in time.
• The 2003–2004 EPSF measured only women of childbearing age, 15 to 49, as part of a maternal and child health survey.

A woman aged 45 in the 2003–04 survey was born in the late 1950s, so that survey's 158.5 cm average for women mostly describes the cohorts born between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s. That lines up neatly with the NCD-RisC values of 158.1 cm for the 1956 cohort and 158.4 cm for the 1976 cohort, which is reassuring: the modelled series and the direct measurements agree for the generations where both have good data.

Height, health and the long view

The NCD-RisC researchers chose to study height partly because it is linked to health across the whole life course. Taller adult height is associated with longer life, a lower risk of heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease, and fewer complications in pregnancy and childbirth, though also with a higher risk of some cancers. The authors also note associations with education and earnings.

For Morocco, the most direct public health link is maternal height. Short stature in mothers is associated with obstructed labor and low birth weight, which is why the family health surveys report the share of women under 145 cm. With only about 1 percent of women below that threshold in both 1992 and 2003–04, adult female height in Morocco is not a significant risk factor at the population level, even though childhood stunting remained common in poorer regions at the time.

Putting the averages to use

Averages describe populations, not individuals. Plenty of Moroccan men are taller than 180 cm and plenty of women are shorter than 150 cm. To see how a specific height ranks, use the height percentile calculator, or check 170 cm in feet and inches. For the global picture, see the full average height by country table.

If you're worried about a child's growth, talk to a pediatrician, who can measure and plot growth on the appropriate charts.