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The literacy rate for all males and females that are at least 15 years old is 86.3%. Males aged 15 and over have a literacy rate of 90%, while females lag only slightly behind at 82.7%. However, massive country-to-country differences exist.
This is a list of countries by literacy rate. The global literacy rate for all people aged 15 and above is 86.3%. The global literacy rate for all males is 90.0%, and the rate for all females is 82.7%. The rate varies throughout the world, with developed nations having a rate of 99.2% (2013), South and West Asia having 70.2% (2015), and sub ...
- Global Literacy Today
- Historical Change in Literacy
- Literacy Around The World Today
- Numeracy
Of the world population older than 15 years, the majority are literate. This interactive map shows how literacy rates vary around the world. In many countries, more than 95% have basic literacy skills. Literacy skills of the majority of the population are a modern achievement as we show below. Globally, however, large inequalities remain, notably b...
Global literacy has grown substantially in the last two centuries
While the earliest forms of written communication date back to about 3,500-3,000 BCE, for centuries literacy remained a very restricted technology closely associated with the exercise of power. It was only during the Middle Ages that book production started growing, and literacy among the general population slowly started becoming important in the Western World.1 While the ambition of universal literacy in Europe was a fundamental reform born from the Enlightenment, it took centuries for it t...
When did literacy start increasing in Europe?
The following visualization shows the spread of literacy in Europe since the 15th century, based on estimates from Buringh and Van Zanden (2009).2 As can be seen, the rising levels of education in Europe foreshadowed the emergence of modern societies. Particularly fast improvements in literacy took place across Northwest Europe in the period 1600-1800. As we discuss below, widespread literacy is considered a legacy of the Age of Enlightenment.
The ambition of universal literacy in Europe was a reform born of the Enlightenment
The next chart shows historical estimates of literacy in England over the last five centuries. The historical estimates are based on the percentage of men and women who could sign documents, a very basic definition of literacy that is often used in historical research on education.3 The first observations refer to men and women in the diocese of Norwich, which lies to the Northeast of London. Here, the majority of men (61%) were unable to write their names in the late 16th century; for women,...
Literacy by generation
To assess the extent to which progress can be expected in the years to come, it is convenient to break down literacy estimates by age groups. The following map, using data from UNESCO, shows such estimates for most countries in the world. As can be seen, in the majority of nations, there is a large difference in literacy rates across generations. These large differences across generations point to a global trend: the high literacy rate among the youth indicates that as time passes, the litera...
Literacy rates by sex
The visualization shows the literacy for rates for young men and women. In countries above the diagonal dashed line, literacy rates are higher for young men than for young women; this is the case for many poorer countries. This chartshows the literacy rate by sex over time. This visualizationshows the ratio of the literacy rate between young women and men around the world.
Numeracy skills over the long run
Numeracy is the ability to understand and work with numbers. The visualization shows how this ability became more common in populations around the world based on a very basic definition of numeracy, the ability to state one's own age correctly.
Numeracy skills today
Compared to the data on literacy we have less information on numeracy skills in the world today. Some information comes from PIAAC, the OECD's survey of the skills of adults. The scatter plot shows how adults in OECD countries scored in the literacy and numeracy dimension. We see that the two aspects are closely correlated; those countries that have high literacy also have high numeracy. PIAAC is only available for the recent past, but it can still give us some insights into how numeracy skil...
Jun 8, 2018 · The chart below shows global literacy rates among adults since 1800. This is a powerful graph: it tells us that over the last two centuries the share of illiterate adults has gone down from 88% to less than 14%. This global perspective on education leads to a natural question: What does it actually mean that a person is ‘literate’ in these ...
Sep 17, 2024 · Its Strategy for Youth and Adult Literacy (2020-2025) pays special attention to the member countries of the Global Alliance for Literacy which targets 20 countries with an adult literacy rate below 50 per cent and the E9 countries, of which 17 are in Africa. The focus is on promoting literacy in formal and non-formal settings with four priority ...
Jul 10, 2023 · This dataset combines long-run cross-country literacy rates from several sources including the World Bank's WDI, CIA Factbook, and other historical data series. Key sources include Buringh & Van Zanden (2009) for data before 1800, Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010) for 1820 and 1870, and van Zanden et al. (2014) for global estimates from 1820-2000.
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What is a literacy rate?
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What does a high literacy rate mean?
The literacy rate is defined by the percentage of the population of a given age group that can read and write. The adult literacy rate corresponds to ages 15 and above, the youth literacy rate to ages 15 to 24, and the elderly to ages 65 and above. It is typically measured according to the ability to comprehend a short simple statement on ...
