Child stunting in Bangladesh fell to 23.6% in 2022, a record low, dropping nearly 16% from 2019.

Bangladesh recorded its lowest child stunting rate of 23.6% of children under 5 in 2022, down from 28.0% in 2019. This marks a 4.4 percentage point decline, or a 15.7% reduction over three years. The longer arc is more striking: stunting stood at 37.0% a decade earlier in 2012 and at 70.9% in 1986, meaning the rate has fallen by 13.4 percentage points, or 36.2%, over the past ten years alone.

This sustained decline matters because stunting reflects cumulative nutritional and health conditions during the most critical window of early childhood development. The pace of recent progress, however, implies that Bangladesh is approaching the range where further reductions tend to become harder, as remaining cases concentrate among populations facing deeper structural barriers such as food insecurity, poor maternal nutrition, and inadequate sanitation. Policy attention must now shift toward identifying and reaching these vulnerable groups, ensuring that gains are not concentrated among better-off households while marginalized communities are left behind. Maintaining the trajectory will require sustained investment in maternal and child health programs.

Data note. Stunting estimates rely on household survey data collected at intervals, so year-to-year movements partly reflect methodological differences across survey rounds rather than smooth underlying change.