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Tanzania · 2022 data
Women's overweight and hypertension by council
Estimated share of women aged 20–49 who are overweight or obese, and who have hypertension, in each of Tanzania's 195 councils. Overweight or obesity ranges from 15% in Ngorongoro District Council to 66% in Tanga City Council, and hypertension from 4% in Serengeti District Council to 24% in Kibaha Town Council. Councils in the same region typically differ by about 18 percentage points on overweight, which region-level figures hide.
Share of women aged 20–49 who are overweight or obese
Overweight or obese means a body mass index of 25 or above. Hypertension means blood pressure of 140/90 mmHg or above at the survey visit, or taking medication to lower it. A map of overweight is not a map of hypertension: rural councils in Ruvuma, Kagera and Morogoro combine high hypertension with moderate overweight, while Mbeya City has the second-highest overweight and low hypertension.
How these estimates were made
The 2022 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS-MIS) weighed and measured 5,335 women aged 20–49 and took the blood pressure of 6,013, about 25 per council. That is too few for reliable council figures on their own. We fitted two models of individual women, one of body mass index and one of hypertension, linking each surveyed woman's outcome to her age, 21 woman and household characteristics measured the same way in the survey and the census, the satellite features of the place she lives, and region. We then applied the models to the 1,160,665 women aged 20–49 in the 2022 census 10% sample and averaged the results by council.
Uncertainty comes from 200 simulated repetitions of the whole process. Aggregated to region, the estimates agree with the survey's region figures within sampling error in 30 of 31 regions for overweight and in all 31 for hypertension. In an independent test, the models' mean squared error was 14% of that of direct survey estimates for overweight and 22% for hypertension, a 2.6-fold and 2.1-fold reduction in typical error.
Hypertension is harder to predict than overweight. Of its 195 council estimates, 58 are rated reliable, 125 “use with caution” and 12 unreliable, so use them to identify groups of councils rather than to rank individual councils.
These are model-based estimates produced by Spacepilots. They are not official statistics of the National Bureau of Statistics, the Office of the Chief Government Statistician Zanzibar or the Ministry of Health; official region and national figures are those in the TDHS-MIS 2022 final report.
4.2mOverweight or obese women aged 20–49
1.5mWomen aged 20–49 with hypertension
194 / 195Overweight estimates rated reliable (CV < 20%)
±8Points, median 95% confidence interval for overweight
Full estimates
This map shows each council's band only. The preview report sets out the approach, the main findings and the quality of the estimates.
The full report and data package give overweight or obesity, obesity and hypertension for all 195 councils and 150 districts, each with standard error, 95% confidence interval and reliability class, plus numbers of women affected, region consistency checks, experimental estimates for 4,336 wards, and detailed maps.
Download the preview report (PDF) →
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