Africans a shadow of their former selves

The prevailing narrative was one of a world of ever-taller people, led by Dutch men and Latvian women, thanks to unprecedented advances in nutrition, even if in the US and elsewhere many people are now getting wider rather than loftier.

Amid the upbeat picture there was a darker story, though. Not only have African nations failed to keep up with the growth surge; in most of the world’s poorest continent, average heights have actually started to fall.

In Sierra Leone, Egypt, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Gambia, Cameroon, Somalia, Angola, Ivory Coast, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Egypt and both Congos, the tallest generation were those born in the 1960s.

In Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Mozambique, Botswana and Gabon the peak was the 1970s for men, although in some cases earlier for women. Since then heights have fallen, by a non-trivial 5cms or so in some countries, as the first graphic and the data set show.

This raises the perhaps uncomfortable possibility that levels of childhood nutrition, the prime determinant of height, have fallen since the end of Africa’s colonial era, even as they have risen virtually everywhere else in the world.

“The timing of it is consistent with the colonial or early independence period,” says Professor Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, who led the research, which was based on the measurements of 18.6m 18-year-olds conducted by a consortium of 800 scientists.

Africans have still grown taller over the past century, but the trends of the past 50 years mean they have fallen back in relative terms.

South Africa, for instance has gone from 50th (out of 200 current countries) in the height table for 18-year-old boys born in 1896 to 158th for 18-year-old boys born in 1996.

Likewise Kenya has gone from 46th to 115th, Zimbabwe from 56th to 128th, Namibia from 63rd to 152nd, Uganda from 96th to 171st and Rwanda from 148th to 194th. And this is not cherry-picking. Africa’s slide down the rankings is pretty much universal, as the underlying data show.

The figures for women, illustrated in the second chart, are just as bad with, for instance South Africa slumping from 36th to 125th over the same time period, Kenya from 25th to 120th and Rwanda from 80th to 171st (The sole riser bucking the trend is Mauritius, up from 162nd to 140th).

One clear trend is that Asia has leapfrogged Africa with, for instance South Korea jumping from 196th to 55th in the women’s height table and China from 153rd to 66th in the men’s.

“In contrast to east Asia’s impressive gains, the rise in height seems to have reversed in Africa, reversing or diminishing Africa’s earlier advantage over Asia,” Prof Ezzati says.

(For those who might question the accuracy of the data in the earlier periods, the report authors accept the older numbers carry a larger margin of error, but believe that data from sources such as military and school records still have some value).

Prof Ezzati believes that Africa’s early height advantage over Asia may have been due to its population having a more diverse diet compared with the traditional vegetable and cereals-based regimen in Asia, an advantage “partly facilitated by lower population density”.

This point has been made by Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist and Nobel Prize winner, who argued that Africans were taller than might have been expected in the 1960s, given their relative poverty, an anomaly that might be explained by the fact that Africa “is well endowed with land relative to its population, so nutrition might be relatively plentiful, despite low national income”.

As Prof Ezzati puts it, many Africans were “grazing animals and hunting and gathering. Where agriculture did exist, there was more diversity”.

However, Prof Ezzati fears that “rising population and environmental pressures . . . coupled with worsening economic status during structural adjustment, may have undermined the earlier dietary advantage” and led to a rise in child stunting, where infants receive insufficient nutrition to reach their full potential.

Research by a team led by Gretchen Stevens, of the World Health Organisation and including Prof Ezzati, noted that “macroeconomic shocks, structural adjustment and trade policy reforms have been implicated in worsening nutritional status in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s”.

They found that these policies “neither expanded agricultural productivity nor reduced poverty,” but instead led to lower spending on agriculture and healthcare.

As a result, the team said children’s average heights “probably deteriorated” in 17 countries between 1985 and 2011, nearly all of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

The idea that painful structural adjustment can reduce nutrition and average height is perhaps strengthened by the fact that the very short list of non-African countries that have seen a reduction in stature includes Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, two ex-Soviet states that have had to adapt to a new post-communist world order.

“The former Soviet Union, while there were major issues, did reasonably well in relation to maternal and child healthcare. If those structures fall apart that can explain [falling heights],” says Prof Ezzati.

Charles Robertson, chief economist at Renaissance Capital, an emerging market-focused investment bank, believes the declining height of Africans is largely a result of weak economic growth in the 1980s, when gross domestic product typically rose by around 2 per cent a year, but population growth was around 3 per cent, reducing income per head.

“The lack of education in the 1960s and 1970s meant that when commodity prices fell in the 1980s there was nothing else to propel these economies at that point,” Mr Robertson says.

“Incomes were going down but people were still having big families because that’s what you do to protect yourself against poverty when you are in poverty. People were getting worse off and as a result less able to give their children sufficient nutrition.”

However, Mr Robertson argues that Africans are now “better educated than they have ever been”, while income per head has also risen since 2000. As a result, he believes average heights will start to “rebound”, rather than declining still further.

Prof Ezzati is also optimistic that the average height of 18-year-old Africans may well start to rise again in five or 10 years, given reductions in child stunting and infant mortality.