An elevation gap: Why children at high altitudes are more likely to experience stunting

For decades, the global fight against child stunting has been framed around a central trinity: Nutrition, sanitation, and poverty. But what if a child’s physical address or geographic location—specifically, the altitude of their home—is an important, and largely overlooked, piece of the story of their growth?

Our new systematic review and meta-analysis, published in Next Research, finds that children under 5 living at high altitudes are about twice as likely to be stunted (low height for age) compared to those at lower altitudes. Altitude is rarely considered in the design or targeting of multi-sectoral nutrition interventions, so these findings suggest we may need to rethink how and where such interventions are prioritized, and how they address the underlying conditions in which high-altitude children are growing up.

These findings should also be read alongside the work of IFPRI’s Jef Leroy and colleagues, who emphasize that stunting is a non-causal summary indicator of early-life adversity rather than a direct cause of poorer schooling, earnings, or non-communicable disease outcomes. In that spirit, this blog post uses stunting as a visible signal of unequal conditions, not as a problem to be “fixed” in isolation from the environments that children grow up in.

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