Average Height in Tanzania (Men & Women)

Average height in Tanzania

Tanzanian adults born in 1996 average 164.8 cm (5′5″) for men and 155.9 cm (5′1″) for women, according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the figures used on this page and across the site. The gap between men and women is only 8.9 cm, one of the smaller differences in the dataset.

By world standards, these are short averages. Tanzanian men born in 1996 rank around 180th of 200 countries and women around 160th. But Tanzania wasn't always near the bottom. A century earlier, Tanzanian men ranked around 133rd and women around 108th, and the generation born in the 1960s was taller than today's young adults. This page explains that reversal and what Tanzania's own surveys show about it.

How the NCD-RisC estimates are made

NCD-RisC reanalyzed 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries, and contributors included researchers from Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences. Self-reported heights were excluded. A statistical model estimated average adult height for each birth year from 1896 to 1996, adjusting for the height people lose with age.

So the 1996 figure describes Tanzanians who turned 18 around 2014. Older Tanzanians, born in the 1950s and 1960s, are estimated to have been taller as young adults, which is unusual in a world where most countries grew taller over the century.

A century of rise and fall

For the first 60 years of the series, Tanzanian heights rose steadily. Men gained 6.8 cm between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts, and women 5.9 cm. Year-by-year figures from Our World in Data put the peak for men in the 1963 cohort, at about 167.7 cm, and for women in the 1965 cohort, at about 157.2 cm.

Then the trend turned. Men born in 1996 were about 3 cm shorter than the peak cohort and women about 1.3 cm shorter. Over the whole century, men ended up only 4 cm taller than the 1896 cohort, and women 4.9 cm taller.

The NCD-RisC authors describe this as part of a wider African pattern. Height gains "reversed in Africa," they write, reversing or narrowing Africa's earlier advantage over Asia. They link it to the rise in childhood stunting in sub-Saharan Africa, which continued into the mid-1990s, and suggest that childhood adversity carried forward into adult height.

What older records show

The historical estimates of Joerg Baten and Matthias Blum, which Our World in Data presents by birth decade, tell a calmer story for Tanzania: a nearly flat line between about 165 and 168.5 cm from the 1870s to the 1980s.

This series starts much higher than NCD-RisC's 160.8 cm for the 1896 cohort, so it suggests a smaller long-run gain. But it agrees on the recent turn: men born in the 1980s were shorter than those born in the 1970s.

Our World in Data's human height page also reproduces figures compiled by the economic historian Gregory Clark for foraging and subsistence societies. Among them, Sandawe men measured in 1944 averaged about 167 cm, and Hadza men measured in the 1970s about 163 cm. Both groups live in Tanzania, and those figures are close to the range of modern national averages.

Childhood stunting: the key to the trend

Tanzania has run Demographic and Health Surveys since 1992, which makes it possible to track child growth over 30 years. Stunting means a child's height-for-age is more than two standard deviations below the median of the WHO reference population.

In the early 1990s, half of all young Tanzanian children were stunted. Those children were born around the same time as the NCD-RisC 1996 cohort, so the high stunting rate fits the estimate that this generation grew up shorter than its parents. Since 2010 stunting has fallen quickly, by 12 percentage points in 12 years. If the link between childhood stunting and adult height holds, Tanzanians born in the 2010s and 2020s should end up taller than the 1996 cohort.

How Tanzania's progress compares with Kenya's

Tanzania's northern neighbor offers a useful comparison, because both countries have run DHS surveys on similar schedules. In The DHS Program's data, stunting among Kenyan children under five was 35.3 percent in 2008, already lower than Tanzania's 42 percent in 2010. By 2022, Kenya had brought its rate down to 17.6 percent, while Tanzania's stood at 30 percent.

Both countries improved, and Tanzania's fall since 2010 was steep. But Kenya started lower and has stayed ahead throughout. The adult height gap between the two countries in the NCD-RisC data, 4.8 cm for men born in 1996, is consistent with that long-standing difference in childhood growth.

A narrow gap between men and women

Tanzania's 8.9 cm difference between men and women is the 15th smallest of the 200 countries in the site's NCD-RisC data. It wasn't always that narrow. The gap widened during the years when heights were rising, then shrank again as men's heights fell faster than women's.

Between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts, men lost 2.6 cm and women 0.9 cm. The NCD-RisC study doesn't explain why men's heights fell more in Tanzania. Several neighboring countries in the table further down show the same kind of narrow gap, including Rwanda (7.9 cm) and Malawi (7.8 cm), both among the smallest in the world.

Short stature among Tanzanian adults today

The 2022 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey and Malaria Indicator Survey (TDHS-MIS) was carried out by the National Bureau of Statistics and the Office of the Chief Government Statistician in Zanzibar, with the Ministries of Health of the mainland and Zanzibar. Teams measured height with ShorrBoard measuring boards and weighed people on digital SECA scales.

Like other DHS surveys, it reports the share of women shorter than 145 cm, a threshold linked to a higher risk of difficult deliveries. Nationally, 2.2 percent of women aged 20–49 were below that height. The DHS Program records 0.7 percent of men below 145 cm. Among adolescent girls aged 15–19, 12 percent were short for their age by international growth standards.

Where very short stature is most common

Among the survey's zones, the Southern Highlands had the highest share (5.6 percent), and the Lake zone the lowest (0.8 percent). Regional figures rest on samples of roughly 75 to 560 women per mainland region, so the ranking of individual regions can shift from one survey to the next, but the gap between the Southern Highlands and the Lake zone is large.

The 2022 survey's age groups show no clear trend among adults: 2.0 percent of women aged 20–29 were under 145 cm, 2.4 percent of women in their thirties and 2.2 percent of women in their forties. Younger women aren't more often very short than older women, but they aren't clearly less often short either.

The share of very short women has edged down over three decades, from 3.8 percent in 1992 to 2.4 percent in 2022 on The DHS Program's harmonized definition. Women's average height in the NCD-RisC data fell less than men's, which fits with these small but steady improvements.

Zanzibar and the mainland

The TDHS-MIS covers both mainland Tanzania and the islands of Zanzibar, which have their own statistics office and health ministry. In 2022, 2.1 percent of mainland women aged 20–49 were under 145 cm, compared with 2.9 percent in Zanzibar. Within Zanzibar, the figure was 3.2 percent on Unguja and 1.9 percent on Pemba. Kusini Unguja recorded the highest island figure, 4.3 percent.

Those island figures need care. The whole Zanzibar sample was 196 women, and Kusini Unguja's was just 17, so one or two very short women change the percentage a lot. On the mainland, the urban–rural pattern was clearer, with 1.4 percent of urban women and 2.5 percent of rural women under 145 cm. That mirrors the wealth gradient in the same table, where women in the richest fifth of households were less than half as likely to be very short as women in the poorest fifth (1.2 percent against 2.7 percent). Schooling showed a similar pattern, falling from 3.9 percent among women who hadn't completed primary school to 1.0 percent among those with secondary education or more.

Weight alongside height

The 2022 survey also found that 36 percent of women aged 20–49 were overweight or obese, and 7 percent were thin. Overweight was much more common in towns. Urban women had an average BMI of 25.9, against 23.4 for rural women. Tanzania now faces undernutrition in children and overweight in adults at the same time.

Tanzania compared with its neighbors

Tanzanian men are shorter than men in most neighboring countries and 4.8 cm shorter than Kenyan men. Tanzanian women are closer to the regional middle. Every country in the table followed the same arc in the NCD-RisC data, rising through the mid-20th century and then falling for the youngest cohorts.

Tanzanian heights in practice

A young Tanzanian man is typically about 5′5″ and a young woman about 5′1″. To see how any height compares, try the height percentile calculator, or compare two people with the height comparison tool.