Average Height in Niger (Men & Women)

How tall are people in Niger?

Niger is one of the countries where the long rise in human height has gone into reverse. The site's figures come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates that people born in Niger in 1996 average 167.7 cm (5′6″) for men and 158.3 cm (5′2.5″) for women. In the site's table of 200 countries and territories, Nigerien men rank 142nd and Nigerien women 114th.

Those numbers hide a striking history. People born in Niger in the 1950s were among the taller populations in West Africa. Men born in 1956 averaged 171.4 cm and women 162.0 cm. Forty years later, both sexes had lost about 3.7 cm. The NCD-RisC paper itself names Niger as an example of this kind of decline.

This article explains the estimates, what happened to Niger's height curve, how national surveys measure children and women, and how Niger compares with its neighbors.

What the averages mean

NCD-RisC organizes height by birth cohort, meaning everyone born in a given year, measured once they're adults. Its 2016 study in eLife pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people born between 1896 and 1996. Self-reported heights were excluded because they're biased in ways that vary by country and social group.

Each country's estimate comes from a Bayesian hierarchical model. Niger's own surveys inform its curve, but so do data from other years and from other countries, especially those in the same region. The authors state that countries with limited data carry wider uncertainty. In Niger's case, the national Demographic and Health Surveys provide measured heights for women, which helps anchor the female estimates.

A century of rise and fall

Between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts, Nigerien men gained 7.5 cm and women 5.7 cm, a respectable improvement that kept pace with much of the world. Then the curve bent. Men born in 1976 were no taller than those born in 1956, and women were already 1.2 cm shorter. Between 1976 and 1996, men lost 3.6 cm and women another 2.5 cm.

The net result is that a Nigerien man born in 1996 is only 3.8 cm taller than one born a century earlier, and a woman only 2.0 cm taller. Over the same century, men worldwide gained about 9 cm. Women born in Niger in 1896 averaged 156.3 cm, which ranks 18th of 200 countries for that cohort in the site data; women born there in 1996 are close to the world average of 159 cm reported by Our World in Data.

Why Niger's height reversed

The NCD-RisC paper describes Niger's pattern as part of a wider exception to the global trend. In many sub-Saharan African countries, 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 countries. The authors give Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda as examples.

They offer several explanations, citing earlier research:

• Child stunting rose. Previous studies documented a rise in stunting among children in sub-Saharan Africa that continued to the mid-1990s. The authors suggest this childhood adversity carried forward into adulthood.
• An early dietary advantage faded. Africa's earlier height advantage over Asia may partly have reflected a more diverse diet than the cereal-and-vegetable diets common in Asia, helped by lower population density.
• Population growth and economic shocks. Rising population, combined with worsening economic conditions during the period of structural adjustment, may have undermined that dietary advantage.

The paper presents these as plausible contributors rather than proven causes for any single country. Our World in Data makes the underlying principle clear: within a population, height differences are mostly genetic, but changes across generations mainly reflect nutrition and health during pregnancy, childhood and adolescence. Niger's shrinking adults are a record of hard childhoods in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

What national surveys show

Niger's Institut National de la Statistique runs the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), with technical support from ICF. The 2012 round, known as EDSN-MICS IV, measured both children and women aged 15 to 49.

Children: very high stunting

According to the 2012 survey, 44% of children under five were stunted, meaning their height for age was more than two standard deviations below the WHO growth standard. Half of those (22% of all children) were severely stunted, more than three standard deviations below. Stunting rose quickly with age, from 16% in babies under six months to 59% at 24 to 35 months, and affected boys and girls at almost the same rate.

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

(The World Bank figure for 2012 differs from the 44% in the DHS report; both point to roughly two in five children or more.)

The series shows no sustained improvement over three decades. That matters for the future: children born after 1996 aren't yet included in any adult height estimate, and the stunting data suggest their adult height is unlikely to recover quickly.

A close look at young children

A detailed cohort study published in BMC Public Health in 2021 followed 6,567 children in Madarounfa, in Maradi region, from 6 to 8 weeks of age until 24 months, measuring them every four weeks between 2014 and 2019, for a total of 139,529 visits. The authors found a complex, two-way relationship between wasting (being too thin for one's length) and stunting, and a significant burden of children who were both at once. Their point was that programs which treat the two conditions separately may miss how closely they're linked.

Women: short stature is rare

The 2012 survey's results for women offer a useful counterpoint. Only 0.8% of women aged 15 to 49 were shorter than 145 cm, the cut-off the report uses for a high obstetric risk. By region, the share ranged from 0.2% in Niamey to 1.2% in Agadez and Maradi. In other words, extremely short stature is uncommon even though child stunting is widespread.

Why women's height and weight are measured

The 2012 report explains why the DHS records the height of every woman it interviews. Height varies between populations partly for genetic reasons, but it's also an indirect indicator of a woman's socioeconomic background, because short stature can result from chronic undernutrition in childhood. Height is also linked to the width of the pelvis, so shorter women are more likely to have complications during pregnancy and especially during delivery, and more likely to have babies of low birth weight. The report notes that the critical height below which a woman is considered at risk varies by population, but is generally put between 140 and 150 cm.

The low share of Nigerien women below 145 cm fits the NCD-RisC estimate that the average woman, even after decades of decline, is still above 158 cm. The two sources measure different things, though. The DHS describes women aged 15 to 49 in 2012, born roughly between 1963 and 1997, while NCD-RisC estimates each birth year separately and smooths across all available surveys.

Among women, undernutrition shows up more in weight. The survey found 16% of women had a body mass index below 18.5, the threshold for chronic energy deficiency, down from 19% in 2006. The share was higher in rural areas (17%) than in towns (11%), and ranged from 10% in Niamey to 24% in Zinder.

Niger and its neighbors

NCD-RisC estimates for Niger and surrounding countries (1996 birth cohort):

Niger's men are now shorter than men in every Sahel neighbor to the west and east, and taller only than men in Benin and Nigeria to the south. Several neighbors share the same pattern of decline. Mali and Chad both peaked with their 1976 male cohorts and have since lost 2 to 3 cm, and Nigeria shows a similar drop. Niger's fall, of 3.7 cm for men from the 1956 peak, is among the steepest in the region.

The narrow gap between men and women

One unusual feature of Niger's data is how close men and women are in height. For the 1996 cohort, the gap is 9.4 cm, against about 12 cm for the world as a whole. The gap was 7.6 cm in the 1896 cohort and widened to 9.4 cm by 1956, then stayed at about that level as both sexes declined together.

Our World in Data shows that men are taller than women in every country, but by very different amounts. The NCD-RisC paper observes that in some countries of Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa recent declines affected men but not women; in Niger, both sexes fell by a similar amount.

Putting Niger's heights in context

The size of the reversal is easiest to see across generations within a family. On the NCD-RisC estimates, a typical Nigerien man born in 1956 stood about 171.4 cm, roughly 5′7.5″. A typical grandson born in 1996 would stand about 167.7 cm, close to 5′6″: about an inch and a half shorter. For women the drop from the 1956 cohort to the 1996 cohort is the same 3.7 cm, from 162.0 cm to 158.3 cm. Few countries anywhere show younger adults this much shorter than their grandparents' generation, and most of those are also in sub-Saharan Africa.

An average Nigerien man born in 1996 stands 167.7 cm, about 5′6″, and an average woman 158.3 cm, about 5′2.5″. To compare an individual with these averages, use the height percentile calculator, which includes Niger, or see the conversions on the cm to feet page for 168 cm. The average height hub lists every country's figures and century-long trend.

Niger's story is the opposite of the familiar one in which every generation is taller than the last. Its adults born in the 1950s were taller than those born before or since. Whether that reversal stops depends on what happens to the children being measured in surveys today, and on how many of them can grow up without the chronic undernutrition the data still record.