Rehaam thinks we’re all getting shorter: Africans, Egyptians included, aren’t as tall as they used to be, according to a study on height published last week. The research is being held out as underscoring humanity’s progress over the last century due to the steady gains in height seen in most countries, the Financial Times’ Steve Johnson writes, but Africa hasn’t quite kept up the pace. In Egypt, adult height has decreased since 1960, by around 5 cm for men, according to the study. The reason? Likely poor childhood nutrition, which has fallen “since the end of Africa’s colonial era, even as they have risen virtually everywhere else in the world,” writes the FT. “The timing of it is consistent with the colonial or early independence period,” says leader of the research Professor Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London.

Renaissance Capital chief economist Charles Robertson feels the drop is due to poor economic growth in the 1980s, when GDP typically climbed around 2% while population growth was at 3%. “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,” he said. “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.”