Obesity in Eritrea

In 2024, about 4.3% of adults in Eritrea were living with obesity — about 1 in 23 adults, according to World Health Organization estimates (the likely range is 2.8% to 6.3%). That is roughly 71 thousand people aged 18 and over.

That is lower than the world average of 16.2%, and ranks 196th highest out of 199 countries. It is below the average for WHO’s Africa region (12.7%).

Back in 1980, the figure was 0.5%. Since then it has gone up by 3.8 percentage points — about 8.6 times the 1980 level. In people, that is a change from about 4,000 to 71 thousand adults, partly because the population itself changed.

Women are more likely to live with obesity than men: 5.8% compared with 2.6%.

Among children and teenagers aged 5 to 19, 1.7% were living with obesity in 2024, compared with 0.2% in 1980 — around 22 thousand young people.

Obesity is not the only weight problem here: 37.1% of adults are underweight (BMI under 18.5). Health experts call this mix the “double burden” of malnutrition.

For context, 8.6% of adults had diabetes in 2022 and 11.8% of adults did not get enough physical activity in 2022. These numbers don’t prove what causes obesity, but they help paint the picture.

Eritrea has a national tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, first introduced in 2001, according to the World Bank’s Global SSB Tax Database.