The height of women in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of health, nutrition, and income in childhood

Abstract

Background: Adult height in individuals has been linked to health and nutrition in childhood, and to health outcomes in later life. Economists have used average adult height as an indicator of the biological standard of living and as a measure of health human capital. However, it is unclear to what extent childhood health and nutrition are reflected in adult height at the population level.

Aim: The study examined the proximate determinants of population adult height for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Subjects and methods: A database was created of adult female height for 24 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for birth cohorts born between 1945 and 1985. The present study examined the effect of infant mortality rate, GDP per capita, and average protein and calorie consumption on cohort adult height.

Results: Most of the variation in height across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is due to fixed effects; however, it was found that variations in cohort height over time are sensitive to changes in infant mortality rate, GDP per capita, and protein intake, both at birth and in adolescence.

Conclusions: Changes in cohort adult height over time in Sub-Saharan Africa are related to changes childhood health and nutrition, although variation across countries appears to be determined mainly by unexplained fixed factors.

• Infant mortality
• nutrition
• women's height
• stature
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Notes

Notes

[1]  Ruff states that ‘the nutritional and overall health levels may account for an increasing proportion of variation’ in the recent secular trends, and that ‘in assessing anthropometric variation in living populations, it is important to consider the influence of both kinds of factors (long-term genetic factors and short-term nutrition and health environments) in order to distinguish one from the other’.

[2]  Effects of migration were not considered in this paper. Inspired by economic opportunities or driven by wars and conflict, people have migrated enormously over the past couple of centuries, quite possibly enough to dampen or even eviscerate the genetic factors identified by Ruff (assuming systematic genetic differences that were large arose from this mechanism).