Average Height in South Africa (Men & Women)

Average height in South Africa

South African adults born in 1996 average 166.7 cm (5′6″) for men and 158.0 cm (5′2″) for women, according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the figures used on this page and across the site. The difference between men and women is just 8.7 cm, the 14th smallest of the 200 countries in the dataset.

South Africa's place in world height rankings has changed dramatically. A century ago, South Africans were among the taller populations on Earth: men born in 1896 ranked around 50th of 200 countries and women around 36th. By the 1996 cohort, men had fallen to around 159th and women to around 126th. Part of that is because other countries grew much taller. Part of it is because South African heights themselves fell for people born after the late 1960s.

How the estimates are made

NCD-RisC reanalyzed 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries. South African contributors included researchers from the South African Medical Research Council, Stellenbosch University, North-West University, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Self-reported heights were excluded.

The model estimates average height for each birth year from 1896 to 1996 and adjusts for height lost with age. The 1996 figure therefore describes South Africans who turned 18 around 2014. People born in the 1960s, who are now in their late fifties and sixties, were estimated to be taller as young adults.

A century of small gains and a recent fall

South Africa's century looks very different from Europe's or East Asia's. Men gained only 3.6 cm between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts, and 0.4 cm more by 1976. In the year-by-year series published by Our World in Data, men peaked with the 1968 cohort at about 169.4 cm, and women with the 1969 cohort at about 159.6 cm. After that, heights fell. Men born in 1996 were 2.7 cm shorter than the peak cohort, and women 1.6 cm shorter.

Over the full century, South African men gained just 1.4 cm and women 3.1 cm. The men's gain is the third smallest of all 200 countries in the NCD-RisC data, ahead of only the Marshall Islands and Pakistan. By comparison, Iranian men gained 16.5 cm over the same period.

The NCD-RisC authors describe a broader African pattern in which height gains "reversed in Africa," reversing or shrinking Africa's earlier height advantage over Asia. They link it to a rise in childhood stunting in sub-Saharan Africa that continued until the mid-1990s, and suggest that childhood adversity carried forward into adult height.

How the world overtook South Africa

South Africa's fall in the rankings came mostly from other countries growing taller. Japanese, South Korean and Iranian men born in 1896 were all shorter than South African men. A century later, all three were taller.

In the 1896 cohort, South African men were 9.1 cm taller than Japanese men. In the 1996 cohort they were 4.1 cm shorter. The Dutch comparison is just as stark: a gap of 4.1 cm in 1896 grew to 15.8 cm a century later.

Women gained more than men

South African women's heights held up better than men's. Women gained 3.1 cm over the century, more than twice the men's 1.4 cm, and their late-century decline was smaller. As a result, the gap between the sexes narrowed.

That's the opposite of what happened in countries where heights rose fast, such as Iran and Turkey, where men's gains outstripped women's and the gap widened. NCD-RisC doesn't offer a specific explanation for why South African men's heights fell further than women's.

The difference shows up in the world rankings too. South African women born in 1996 rank around 126th of 200 countries, well above the men's 159th. In the 1896 cohort, women also ranked higher (around 36th against around 50th), but the gap between the two rankings has widened from about 14 places to about 33. Measured against other countries, South African women have held their position better than South African men.

The longer historical record

South Africa also appears in the long-run height reconstructions of Joerg Baten and Matthias Blum, produced for the Clio-Infra project and charted by Our World in Data. Their series puts South African men born in the 1890s at about 170 cm already, and then drifts slowly downward.

The two series start in different places. Baten and Blum have men born in the 1890s about 5 cm taller than NCD-RisC's 1896 estimate. But they agree on the shape of the late 20th century. Men born in the 1970s and 1980s were shorter than those born in the 1950s, and there was no sustained rise of the kind seen in most of the world.

The South Africa Demographic and Health Survey 2016

The most recent national survey with height measurements is the South Africa Demographic and Health Survey (SADHS) 2016. It was carried out by the National Department of Health, Statistics South Africa and the South African Medical Research Council, with support from ICF. Survey teams measured adults with Seca 213 portable stadiometers and weighed them on Seca 878 digital scales.

The published report doesn't give average adult height, but it does report the share of women shorter than 145 cm, a threshold associated with a higher risk of difficult deliveries. Nationally, 2.5 percent of women aged 15 and over and 1.5 percent of women aged 15–49 were below that height. The DHS Program records 0.3 percent of men below 145 cm.

Short stature by age, province and background

Women aged 65 and over were the most likely to be very short, at 7.9 percent, which likely reflects both the conditions they grew up in and height loss with age. Among women under 55, the share stayed between 1.5 and 2.4 percent.

Education showed the clearest gradient. 5.6 percent of women with no schooling were under 145 cm, against 0.3 percent of women with more than secondary education. The pattern by household wealth was less consistent: 3.1 percent in the poorest fifth, 1.6 percent in the middle fifth and 2.5 percent in the richest fifth.

The report also breaks the figures down by the population groups used in South African statistics. The share of women under 145 cm was 2.3 percent among Black African women, 3.5 percent among Coloured women, 11.8 percent among Indian/Asian women and none among white women in the sample. The Indian/Asian and white samples were small, 87 and 193 women respectively, so those figures are imprecise.

Childhood stunting and overweight together

The SADHS 2016 found that 27 percent of children under five were stunted, meaning their height-for-age was more than two standard deviations below the WHO median. Another 3 percent were wasted (too thin for their height), 6 percent were underweight and 13 percent were overweight.

In South Africa, then, stunting and overweight exist side by side in the same generation of children, and a similar double burden shows up among adults. In 2016, 68 percent of women aged 15 and over were overweight or obese, up from 56 percent in the 1998 survey, and their mean BMI rose from 27.3 to 29.2. Men's mean BMI barely changed, from 23.4 to 23.6, and 10 percent of men were underweight.

The contrast between the sexes is sharp. In 2016 the majority of men (59 percent) had a BMI in the normal range and just under a third (31 percent) were overweight or obese, while more than two-thirds of women were. Because BMI divides weight by the square of height, these figures depend on accurate height measurement, which is why the survey used stadiometers rather than asking people their height.

The survey report also cautions that child anthropometry data should be interpreted with care, especially in the Western Cape and Gauteng.

South Africa compared with its neighbors

South African men are shorter than men in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Eswatini and Namibia, and taller only than men in Lesotho and Mozambique. Botswana is the outlier: its men are 4.9 cm taller than South African men and were barely affected by the late-century decline (171.7 cm for the 1956 cohort, 171.6 cm for 1996). Further north, Kenya and Tanzania show the same rise-and-fall pattern as South Africa.

South African heights in practice

A young South African man is typically about 5′6″ and a young woman about 5′2″. The 166 cm page gives the exact conversion for a height close to the male average and shows how it compares with averages elsewhere. Older South Africans born in the 1960s, the tallest generation in the NCD-RisC estimates, average closer to 169 cm for men. The average height hub lists all 200 countries on the same NCD-RisC basis. To see where an individual height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or line up two people in the height comparison tool.