Average Height in Mozambique (Men & Women)

Average height in Mozambique

Men born in Mozambique in 1996 reach an average adult height of 164.8 cm (5′5″), and women 154.0 cm (5′1″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the figures we use for Mozambique on this page, in the height comparison tool and across the average height by country rankings.

Mozambique is among the shorter countries in the world in these estimates. Men rank 179th and women 181st among 200 countries and territories. Men are 10.8 cm taller than women on average, a narrower gap than the global norm of about 12 cm for the 1996 cohort.

Women's position has changed most. Mozambican women born in 1896 ranked 109th in the world, close to the middle; a century later they ranked 181st. Their net gain over a hundred years was just 3.1 cm, one of the smallest in the dataset.

How the estimates work

NCD-RisC reports height by birth cohort. The value for 1996 is the expected height at age 18 of people born in 1996. That makes it possible to compare generations directly, rather than mixing together adults of all ages, as a survey of the whole population would.

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

A century of growth and reversal

Mozambicans grew taller through the first half of the series: men gained 6.9 cm and women 5.9 cm between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts. Women peaked with the 1956 cohort, and then lost 2.8 cm by 1996, giving back almost half of their earlier gains. Men peaked with the 1976 cohort and then lost 1.9 cm.

Women lost more ground than men

One unusual feature of Mozambique's curve is how the gap between the sexes has widened. In the 1896 cohort, men were only 8.2 cm taller than women, one of the narrowest gaps in the dataset. By 1956 the gap was 9.2 cm, by 1976 10.8 cm, and it stayed at 10.8 cm in 1996. Women stopped growing taller a generation earlier than men and then fell further from their peak.

This runs against the general pattern NCD-RisC found. Across countries, men's and women's height changes over the century were correlated, and in the 1896 cohort the gap tended to be slightly larger, not smaller, in poorly nourished populations. Mozambique began the century with a small gap and ended it with a gap closer to the global norm, mainly because of what happened to women's height after the 1950s. The study doesn't explain why individual countries diverge in this way, and the surveys available for Mozambique measure only women, so there's no direct way to check the trend for men.

A regional reversal

Mozambique fits one of the central findings of the NCD-RisC study. In many sub-Saharan African countries, adult height decreased, or at best stayed flat, for people born after the early 1960s, by up to about 5 cm from the peak in some countries. The authors offered several possible explanations for the regional pattern:

• Rising child stunting. Earlier research had shown that stunting among children in sub-Saharan Africa rose until the mid-1990s, and the authors suggest this carried through into adult height.
• Loss of an early advantage. A century ago, African populations may have benefited from more varied diets and lower population density than parts of Asia. Rapid population growth may have eroded that.
• Economic decline. Worsening economic conditions during the structural adjustment era may have damaged nutrition.

The study didn't attribute causes country by country, so these are regional hypotheses rather than a verdict on Mozambique specifically.

Childhoods during conflict

Mozambique's history adds context. A civil war between the ruling FRELIMO and the RENAMO insurgents was fought from 1977 to 1992. The men and women of the 1976 cohort were small children when it began, and the 1996 cohort was born a few years after it ended, into a country recovering from the war. The NCD-RisC data can't show how much of the decline was due to the conflict, but any honest reading of Mozambique's curve has to keep it in mind.

What the national surveys measure

Mozambique's health surveys, run by the national statistics institute (INE) with the international DHS program, measure the height of women and young children. The most recent is the Inquérito Demográfico e de Saúde (IDS) 2022–23, which collected height and weight for 93 percent of eligible women aged 15 to 49.

Health technicians were trained to measure children and adults, with standardisation exercises and retraining for anyone who failed them. Height was measured on a ShorrBoard measuring board, standing for adults and for children aged two and over, and lying down for younger children. To check precision, two children in each enumeration area were randomly selected and measured a second time, against the DHS program's standard of less than 1 cm difference between readings.

The survey doesn't publish an average adult height. Instead it reports the share of women shorter than 145 cm, a threshold used to identify women at higher risk of obstructed labor. For women aged 20 to 49, that share was about 4 percent nationally. The DHS series shows a slow decline over a quarter of a century:

The 2022–23 report also found that 17 percent of adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 were short for their age, a much higher share than among adult women, which reflects how far behind international growth standards many girls still are in their teens.

Large gaps by province and wealth

The headline rate hides wide differences. In 2022–23, the share of adult women under 145 cm was:

• Nampula: 7.4 percent, the highest of any province.
• Cabo Delgado: 6.0 percent.
• Niassa: 4.3 percent.
• Inhambane: 0.8 percent.
• Maputo city: effectively 0 percent.
• Rural areas: 4.8 percent, compared with 2.1 percent in urban areas.
• Poorest fifth of households: 5.7 percent, compared with 1.3 percent in the richest.

The northern provinces, especially Nampula and Cabo Delgado, consistently show the shortest women, while the south around Maputo shows the tallest.

Child stunting: the root of the problem

The share of children who are stunted, meaning too short for their age compared with WHO growth standards, is the best single predictor of future adult height. Mozambique's rates have been high for as long as national surveys have measured them:

For roughly fifteen years, more than four in ten young Mozambican children were stunted. The latest survey shows real improvement, to about 37 percent, but the regional divide is stark:

A child in Nampula was more than five times as likely to be stunted as a child in Maputo province. The same northern provinces that have the most short adult women also have the most stunted children, which suggests that the gap in adult height between north and south is likely to persist for another generation.

Are young Mozambicans taller?

NCD-RisC published a separate analysis in The Lancet in 2020 that modelled the height of children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019. Its country data put 19-year-old Mozambicans in 2019 at about 164.3 cm for young men and 155.4 cm for young women. In 1985, the same model gave 164.0 cm and 155.0 cm.

In other words, there was almost no change over 34 years. Young Mozambican men ranked 196th of 200 countries on this measure, and young women 179th. The 2020 analysis used newer data and a different model from the 2016 cohort study, so the two shouldn't be combined into one trend. But both point to a population whose average height has been essentially static since the 1970s, and the persistence of high child stunting through 2011 explains why.

The fall in stunting since 2011 hasn't reached adulthood yet. Children who were under five in 2022–23 will turn 19 in the 2030s, and they are the generation most likely to show the first real gains.

Mozambique and its neighbors

Mozambique sits among the shorter countries of southern and eastern Africa. Mozambican men are exactly level with Tanzanian men and 2.6 cm taller than Malawian men, but 1.9 cm shorter than South Africans and 3.8 cm shorter than Zimbabweans. Mozambican women are notably short for the region, about 4 cm below women in Zimbabwe, Eswatini and South Africa and 1.9 cm below Tanzanian women. Only Madagascar, to the east, is shorter for both sexes.

Why the numbers matter

NCD-RisC treats average height as a long-run indicator of children's nutrition and health. Taller adults tend to live longer and have lower risks of heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease, and taller mothers face fewer complications in childbirth, though taller height is also associated with higher risk of some cancers. Short maternal stature in particular is why the national surveys track women under 145 cm.

Seen that way, Mozambique's flat height curve and decades of high child stunting are two views of the same challenge, and the recent fall in stunting is the most important positive signal in the data.

Using the averages

An average describes the middle of a population, not any individual. Many Mozambican men are taller than 175 cm and many women are shorter than 150 cm. To see where a specific height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 165 cm to feet and inches.

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