Stunting Prevalence in Children Under Five

Children under 5 who are stunted (%)·Higher is worse — rank 1 is worst affected·Published by UNICEF, WHO and World Bank Group (Joint Malnutrition Estimates)

We hold the 2024 edition of this indicator, covering 162 countries.

162 countries, each from its own most recent reading (1995–2024), from the Joint Malnutrition Estimates of UNICEF, WHO and the World Bank, read from UNICEF's SDMX warehouse (NT_ANT_HAZ_NE2). Stunting is being too short for one's age — the standard measure of chronic undernutrition. ⚠ IT IS CUMULATIVE, not current: it records deprivation across the first thousand days of life and does not fall quickly when conditions improve, which is exactly why it is the measure that matters. A country's stunting rate today describes the conditions its five-year-olds were born into. ⚠ Co-produced with WHO, whose own terms are non-commercial; it is taken here from UNICEF's warehouse under UNICEF's CC BY 3.0 IGO grant, the same decision already made for under-five mortality. ⚠ ONE READING PER COUNTRY, and UNICEF's own DATA_SOURCE_PRIORITY flag picks which survey — the publisher's choice, not ours. No rank is published; the POSITION is derived here and labelled as ours.