Average Height in Zambia (Men & Women)

How tall are Zambians?

The site's figures for Zambia come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates that Zambians born in 1996 average 166.5 cm (5′5.5″) for men and 155.8 cm (5′1.5″) for women. In the site's table of 200 countries and territories, Zambian men rank 165th and Zambian women 161st.

Like many countries in southern and eastern Africa, Zambia's adults are shorter today than the generation born in the 1950s. Men born in 1956 averaged 169.3 cm, and women 159.3 cm. The decline since then, 2.8 cm for men and 3.5 cm for women, mirrors decades of very high child stunting recorded in Zambia's national surveys.

Those surveys also show the stunting rate falling steadily since about 2000, and research in Zambia has linked children's height to their learning and schooling, which gives the trend importance beyond height itself.

How the estimates work

For Zambia, the NCD-RisC model draws on measured surveys only, never self-reports, and expresses each result as a birth cohort: everyone born in a given year, at about age 18. Read that way, the 1956 cohort's 169.3 cm for men is the high point, and the 166.5 cm figure for men born in 1996 describes Zambians who reached adulthood around 2014, almost 3 cm shorter than their grandparents' generation.

A Bayesian hierarchical model combined each country's own surveys with information from other years and from neighboring countries in the same region. The authors note that estimates are less certain where data are limited, so differences of a centimeter or so between Zambia and its neighbors shouldn't be over-read.

A century of change

Between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts, Zambian men gained 7.1 cm and women 7.8 cm, roughly in line with the world. Then progress stopped. Men born in 1976 were no taller than men born in 1956, and women had already lost a centimeter. Between 1976 and 1996, men lost 2.8 cm and women 2.5 cm.

The result is that Zambians born in 1996 are only 4.3 cm taller than those born a century earlier, for both men and women. Our World in Data reports a global gain of about 8 to 9 cm over the same period. Zambian women born in 1996 are about the same height as women born around 1926.

Why heights fell

The NCD-RisC paper identifies a broad exception to the worldwide rise in height: in many sub-Saharan African countries, adult height decreased or at best stayed the same for people born after the early 1960s. The authors cite earlier research showing that child stunting rose in sub-Saharan Africa until the mid-1990s, and conclude that this childhood adversity may have carried forward into adulthood.

The same review points to diet and economics at the scale of the whole region: a more varied diet, helped by low population density, may once have given Africans a height edge over Asians, and population growth plus the hardship of the structural adjustment years may have eroded it. Those arguments are not specific to Zambia, so the country's own child growth surveys are the better evidence.

Child stunting in Zambia

Zambia has run Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) since 1992. The 2018 round was carried out by the Zambia Statistics Agency with the Ministry of Health and the University Teaching Hospital Virology Laboratory, with technical support from ICF. Stunting means a child's height for age is more than two standard deviations below the WHO growth standard.

The long-term trend

The World Bank's series of stunting estimates for Zambia:

Stunting peaked near 60% around 1999, when the cohorts NCD-RisC estimates as shortest were young children or adolescents. Since then it has fallen by almost half.

The 2018 survey

The 2018 DHS found that 35% of children under five were stunted, 4% were wasted, 12% were underweight and 5% were overweight. The report notes that stunting and underweight both fell considerably between 1992 and 2018, from 46% to 35% and from 21% to 12%.

The breakdown shows where stunting is concentrated:

Children reported as very small at birth were much more likely to be stunted (50%) than those of average size or larger (33%). The jump from 19% in the first six months to 46% at 18 to 23 months is why the report stresses the importance of good nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life. The gap between rural and urban children was relatively small, while boys were noticeably more likely to be stunted than girls.

How children are measured

DHS teams in Zambia measure height with Shorr measuring boards. Children under two are measured lying down (recumbent length) and older children standing. In 2018, weight was measured with SECA 878U digital scales. The survey identified 10,094 children under five who were eligible for height and weight measurement.

Policy: the first 1,000 days

The 2018 report describes how the government has tried to accelerate progress. Nutrition was prioritized in national plans including the National Food and Nutrition Policy (2006), the National Food and Nutrition Strategic Plan 2017–2021 and the National Health Strategic Plan 2017–2021. One flagship measure was the First 1,000 Most Critical Days Programme, which focuses on strengthening and expanding interventions to prevent stunting in children under two. The report says the government encourages investment in well-tested, low-cost and effective nutrition interventions.

Stature and schooling

Height-for-age isn't only a marker of past nutrition. A study published in Developmental Psychology in 2015 by Dana McCoy, Stephanie Zuilkowski and Günther Fink followed 2,711 Zambian six-year-olds. They found that early learning at home and outside it explained much of the link between household socioeconomic status and children's cognitive skills, including language, nonverbal reasoning and executive function. Child height-for-age, which they used as a proxy for overall nutrition and health, also predicted children's cognitive skills and whether they enrolled in school early and on time.

The authors frame these findings as evidence for how poverty, physical growth and learning connect in low-income settings, where malnutrition and infectious disease are common. For Zambia, it means the fall in stunting matters for education as well as for adult height.

Women's height in Zambia

The 2013–14 Zambia DHS reported the share of women aged 15 to 49 shorter than 145 cm. The report explains that short stature in women is a risk factor for poor birth outcomes and obstetric complications, because it's linked with a smaller pelvis, which can make delivery more difficult and raises the risk of low birth weight babies.

Nationally, 1.9% of women were shorter than 145 cm. By province:

The report notes that women aged 15 to 19 (3%), women with no education (3%) and women in the poorest wealth quintile (4%) were more likely to be below 145 cm. The share was 2.4% in rural areas and 1.4% in towns. The three northern provinces of Luapula, Northern and Muchinga stand out, with rates two to five times higher than Central or Southern provinces.

The provincial pattern for women matches the pattern for children. In the 2018 survey, child stunting was highest in Northern (46%) and Luapula (45%) provinces and lowest in Western and Southern (29% each). The provinces where the most women are very short are the same provinces where the most children are stunted today, which fits the idea that adult height carries a record of childhood conditions. The 2018 survey didn't measure adults, which is why the women's figures here come from the 2013–14 round.

The same survey found that 22.8% of women were overweight or obese, and that urban women were more than twice as likely to be overweight or obese as rural women (31.9% against 14.6%).

Zambia and its neighbors

NCD-RisC estimates for Zambia and neighboring countries (1996 birth cohort):

Zambia sits in the middle of its neighborhood. Its men are 4.3 cm taller than Malawian men but 5.1 cm shorter than men in Botswana. Its women are about level with Tanzanian women and 2.4 cm shorter than Zimbabwean women.

Almost every country in this table shows the same rise-and-fall shape. Zambia's men and Tanzania's men have both lost 2.8 cm since their 1956 peaks, and Zimbabwe's men 2.7 cm since their 1976 peak.

Men, women and the size of the decline

Zambian women lost slightly more height than men after their peak: 3.5 cm from the 1956 cohort to the 1996 cohort, against 2.8 cm for men. Even so, the gap between the sexes has been remarkably stable across the whole century, between 10.0 and 11.0 cm in every cohort shown, and 10.7 cm in both the 1896 and the 1996 cohorts. That's a little smaller than the global gap of about 12 cm implied by Our World in Data's averages for the 1996 cohort.

The 2018 survey found boys more likely to be stunted than girls (38% against 31%). If that difference persists, it could eventually show up as a smaller male advantage in adult height, but the century-long series suggests the gap has changed little through earlier ups and downs.

Using these numbers

An average Zambian man born in 1996 stands 166.5 cm, about 5′5.5″, around 4.5 cm below the global male average of 171 cm reported by Our World in Data. An average woman, at 155.8 cm, is about 5′1.5″, compared with a global female average of 159 cm.

To compare an individual height with these figures, use the height percentile calculator, or convert on the cm to feet page for 166 cm. The average height hub lists every country.

Zambia's height record shows the cost of the hard decades of the late twentieth century, when more than half of young children were stunted. The steady fall in stunting since 1999 is the clearest sign that the decline in adult height may end with the generations born in the 2000s and 2010s, though their adult heights won't be measured for years.