Average Height in Venezuela (Men & Women)

How tall are Venezuelans today?

The site's figures for Venezuela come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), a network of health researchers that pooled measured heights from population surveys around the world. For Venezuelans born in 1996, the most recent cohort in that study, the estimated averages are 171.6 cm (5′7.5″) for men and 157.4 cm (5′2″) for women. That puts Venezuelan men near the middle of the world table, 96th of the 200 countries and territories on this site, while Venezuelan women sit lower, at 135th.

The gap between the sexes is 14.2 cm, which is wider than in many countries. It reflects a relatively short female average more than an unusually tall male one; women in neighboring Brazil and in Chile average 3 to 4 cm more than Venezuelan women, while the men are much closer.

These numbers describe a specific group of people. A "birth cohort" means everyone born in a given year, measured once they're adults. The 1996 cohort turned 18 in 2014. Most of them therefore finished growing before the deepest years of Venezuela's economic and humanitarian crisis, a point that matters a great deal when reading the data, and one this article comes back to below.

How the estimates were built

The NCD-RisC study, published in eLife in 2016, reanalyzed 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people born between 1896 and 1996. The authors excluded self-reported height because people misreport it in ways that vary by country, age, sex and education. Venezuelan researchers from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the Universidad Centro-Occidental Lisandro Alvarado and other institutions are listed among the paper's collaborating members.

Every country estimate comes from a Bayesian hierarchical model. A country's figure is informed by its own surveys where they exist, and also by data from other years in the same country and from other countries in the same region. The model leans more on regional information when a country's own data are thin, and the paper says plainly that countries with limited data, or data mainly from local studies, carry wider uncertainty. Small differences between Venezuela and its neighbors, a centimeter or so, should be read with that in mind.

A century of growth, 1896 to 1996

Venezuelans grew substantially taller over the twentieth century, as people did in most of Latin America:

Over the full century men gained 11.6 cm and women 12.7 cm. Women born in 1896 averaged under 145 cm. The largest jumps came early: men added 4.8 cm between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts and another 4.0 cm by 1956, while women gained 6.3 cm and then 5.0 cm in the same two intervals.

After the 1956 cohort the pace slowed sharply. Men born in 1976 were 2.0 cm taller than those born in 1956, and the 1996 cohort added only 0.8 cm more. Women gained 0.9 cm and then 0.5 cm. By the time the last cohort in the study was born, Venezuelan height was nearly flat.

The NCD-RisC paper notes that height is still increasing in many countries of Latin America. Venezuela's curve is flatter than that description suggests, especially for women, though the estimates don't tell us why. Our World in Data, which republishes the NCD-RisC series, explains the general mechanism: the spread of heights within a population is largely genetic, but differences between generations and between countries mostly reflect nutrition and health during pregnancy, childhood and adolescence.

The crisis generation and what child data show

The deepest question about Venezuelan height is about people who were children after 2014, and no adult estimate covers them yet. The best evidence comes from measurements of young children, where poor nutrition shows up as stunting: a height-for-age more than two standard deviations below the World Health Organization growth standard.

Before the crisis

The World Bank's series of modeled stunting estimates for Venezuela fell from 18.6% of children under five in 1990 to 13.4% in 2009, the last year in the series. In other words, child growth was improving through the 1990s and 2000s, which fits the slow upward drift in adult height for cohorts born in those decades.

The information blackout

After that, official data become scarce. A 2020 paper in Anales Venezolanos de Nutrición by Yngrid Candela states that official figures on malnutrition in children and adolescents had not been published since 2007, and that the only figures from the National Institute of Nutrition (INN) appeared in 2014. The paper also mentions an INN study of overweight and obesity carried out in 2008–2010.

The ENCOVI survey, a national living-conditions survey, emerged in this vacuum. It was launched by researchers at three universities, the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB), the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and the Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB), and its coordinators describe it as a response to an official information blackout in which the national statistical system stopped functioning as a provider of data.

What ENCOVI found

A 2020 presentation of the ENCOVI 2019–2020 results by demographer Anitza Freitez summarizes the nutrition findings:

• About 30% of children under five had chronic malnutrition measured by low height for age, roughly 639,000 children.
• About 8% were underweight by weight for age.
• 79% of households were in some degree of food insecurity.
• By the team's estimate, Venezuela had the second-worst rate of chronic child malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean, behind only Guatemala (46.7% in 2015). For comparison, the same slide shows Chile at 1.8% (2014), a figure that matches the World Bank series.

A separate study in the same journal measured 1,851 children attending food and nutrition programs at 20 community centers in five Venezuelan states. Chronic malnutrition among the children under five was 29%, and 25% of the older children showed growth retardation by height for age. These children were in assistance programs, so they aren't a national sample, but the result lines up with ENCOVI's national figure.

What this means for future averages

Stunting in early childhood is strongly linked with shorter adult height, which is why NCD-RisC treats adult stature as a summary of childhood nutrition and health. The paper also points out that height decreased or stagnated in many sub-Saharan African countries for cohorts born after the early 1960s, following a rise in childhood stunting there. Whether Venezuelan cohorts born in the 2010s end up shorter as adults won't be measurable for years, but the child data are the reason for concern.

Venezuela compared with its neighbors

Here's how Venezuela compares with nearby countries in the same NCD-RisC data (1996 birth cohort):

Venezuelan men are essentially level with Chileans and about 2 cm taller than Colombians, but 2 to 3 cm shorter than Brazilians and Argentines. Among women the picture shifts. Venezuelan women are below Guyana's and close to Colombia's, and about 3.5 cm shorter than Brazilian women.

The NCD-RisC paper describes Central and Andean Latin America as one of the regions where people born in 1896 were shortest in the world. Peru's averages remain well below Venezuela's, while Venezuela's century-long gains put it in the upper middle of South America for men.

Why the women's figures deserve attention

Venezuelan women gained more height over the century than men did (12.7 cm against 11.6 cm), yet they still rank much lower in the world table: 135th, against 96th for men. Most of their gain came before the 1956 cohort. Women born in 1996 were just 1.4 cm taller than women born in 1956, while men added 2.8 cm over the same forty years.

The NCD-RisC authors give a public-health reason to watch women's height closely. Short maternal stature raises the risk of babies who are small for their gestational age and of preterm births, both risk factors for newborn deaths, as well as pregnancy complications. The paper concludes that whether women's height improves or stagnates can influence trends in infant and maternal mortality. More broadly, it links taller adult height with longer life and lower risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and with a higher risk of some cancers.

That's why child-growth data matter here. The 2020 community study measured children's weight and their height (or length, for infants) and compared them with WHO growth standards. It found that more than half of the children in every age group were at least at risk on height-for-age, and that overall nutritional vulnerability was highest among children under two and those aged 11 to 15. Girls who are stunted in those years can become shorter mothers, which is one way a nutritional crisis can carry into the next generation.

What 171.6 cm and 157.4 cm look like in practice

An average Venezuelan man born in 1996 stands 171.6 cm, about 5′7.5″. That's close to the global average for men in the same cohort, which Our World in Data gives as 171 cm. An average woman, at 157.4 cm, is about 5′2″, below the global female mean of 159 cm for the same cohort.

To place an individual height against these averages, the height percentile calculator lets you pick Venezuela and see roughly where a given height falls. For a quick conversion between centimeters and feet, the cm to feet page for 170 cm and the general height converter are useful, and the average height hub lists all 200 countries side by side.

A few points to keep in mind when using these figures:

• They describe young adults. Older Venezuelans, born in the 1950s or earlier, are shorter on average, partly because they grew up in poorer conditions and partly because people lose some height with age.
• They're national averages. NCD-RisC doesn't publish Venezuelan regional or urban–rural breakdowns, and the official data that might allow one haven't been released for years.
• They predate mass emigration. The ENCOVI team counted around five million Venezuelans living abroad by 2020. Future surveys inside the country will be measuring a population whose age structure and make-up have changed, which could shift averages for reasons unrelated to nutrition.

Reading Venezuelan height data carefully

Height is often used as a measure of a population's biological standard of living. Our World in Data notes that it's particularly valuable where other statistics are missing. Venezuela after 2014 is a clear modern case: income, price and health data became unreliable or unavailable, while a tape measure and a scale can still be carried into a household survey.

For now, the best summary is this. Venezuelans born up to the mid-1990s grew about 12 cm taller than their great-grandparents, and the gains had nearly leveled off by the end of the twentieth century. The children who grew up during the crisis years are the generation most at risk, and independent surveys show high levels of stunting among them. Their adult height, measured in the 2030s, will show how much of that early setback became permanent.