About 13.37 cm stretched, from the only clean measurement study in the country. Orakwe 2007 measured 115 men and never measured an erection. The claimed 15 cm sits above every Nigerian measurement on record, and Nigeria is one of the countries that ranking is most often used to make a point about.
What the internet claims
15.0cm
labelled erect
The compilation behind the viral maps
D
vs
What was measured
13.37cm
stretched, 115 men
Orakwe et al., West Afr J Med, 2007
The claim runs 1.63 cm above the measurement, and the two do not measure the same thing: the claim says erect, the study measured stretched. There is no accepted way to convert between them.
What was actually measured in Nigeria?
Orakwe 2007 is small but honest: 115 men, clinician-measured, flaccid and stretched, published in the West African Journal of Medicine. No erect measurement, so no basis for an erect national figure. Everything the map claims about Nigeria goes beyond what the study reports.
The second study is where it gets strange. Takure 2021 measured 271 men at a urology clinic in southwest Nigeria and split them by age: 10.6 cm stretched in men aged 21 to 50, and 14.1 cm in men aged 51 to 98. Penile length does not increase by three and a half centimetres with age. Something in that sample or that protocol is wrong, and the honest response is to flag it rather than average it into a national figure.
Beyond those two there is Ajmani 1985, which measured 320 Nigerian medical students flaccid only. That is the entire evidence base: 115 men measured stretched, 271 measured with an implausible age split, and 320 measured flaccid, standing behind a claimed erect average for roughly 55 million adult men.
Every study located for Nigeria
More than one measurement exists here, and they disagree. All of them, in the
order they were published.
10.6 cm in men aged 21–50 and 14.1 cm in men aged 51–98. The older group measuring larger is not credible and is reported here rather than averaged away.
How does that compare with the rest of the world?
The claim puts Nigeria 33rd of 119 countries on the ranked list. Here is that number set against the figures that come with a method attached.
Figure
cm
What it is
The claim for Nigeria
15.00
Labelled erect. No method, no sample size, no reference.
Orakwe et al., West Afr J Med
13.37
stretched, 115 men, 2007. The best located
measurement in Nigeria.
Clinically measured worldwide
13.12
Erect, 15,521 men. Veale 2015, the pooled clinical figure.
Pooled worldwide
13.93
Erect, 55,761 men. Belladelli 2023, 75 studies.
Pooled for Africa
14.88
Erect, 95 % confidence interval
12.50–17.26 cm
. Belladelli 2023.
That last interval is 4.76 cm wide,
for a whole continent, from the largest meta-analysis there is. The claimed map it sits
under spreads all 119 countries across
7.9 cm and prints every
country to one decimal place. Read those two sentences together and you have the
entire problem with penis size by country.
How many men does the claim cover?
115 measured → 55,000,000 described
115 men in Nigeria appear in the studies this register could locate. The claimed figure is applied to roughly 55,000,000 adult men: one measured man for every 478,261.
Where would you land in Nigeria?
Against the claimed figure, because that is the number people mean when they ask. It
is the weaker of the two numbers above, and the calculator says so. Everything is
computed in your browser and nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
Travel advisory desk
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1,350,250,000men smaller
1,350,240,000men larger
50 of 100 men worldwide are larger than you.
L 13.6 cm
Estimated from the claimed world mean of 13.6 cm across ≈ 2,700,490,000 adult
men in 119 countries. You beat the claimed mean in 31 of them. The
claims are the internet's, not ours; we are grading them one by one.
See the audit.
What should you take from this?
Nigeria carries one of the higher figures on the viral map and one of the thinner evidence bases behind it. Every located Nigerian measurement is below the claim, and none of them measured what the claim says it measured.
This is the pattern across West and Central Africa in this register, and it is worth naming plainly: the countries the map puts at the top are the countries with the least data. Ghana, Cameroon and DR Congo, all above Nigeria in the ranking, have no located measurement study at all between them.
Nearby in the register
The nearest countries with an entry of their own here.
Nearer still, and with nothing to show: Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast. Those
countries carry a claimed figure on every map and no located study behind it, so they
have no page here. The method page lists all of them.
Sources for this page
Orakwe et al., West Afr J Med, 2007, n = 115. Clinician-measured, flaccid and stretched.
Takure et al., Pan Afr Med J, 2021, n = 271. Stretched, split by age.
Study
Veale D et al. Am I normal? BJU International 2015; 115(6): 978–986. The pooled
clinical figures used throughout this site.
Belladelli F et al. Worldwide Temporal Trends in Penile Length. World J Mens Health
2023; 41(4). The regional pooled figures and confidence intervals.
The full reference list, the grading scheme and all 119 claims are on the
method and sources page.