Educational Change: UNESCO

Cover of the Global Education Digest 2010

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) announced the publication of the Global Education Digest 2011. The focus of this year's edition of the GED is on secondary education.

Growing enrolment in primary education over past decades - partly due to the emphasis on universal primary education by the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All - has led to increased demand for secondary education. The Global Education Digest 2011describes trends in participation in and completion of lower and uppersecondary education from 1970 to the present, as well as disparities inaccess to education of children of secondary school age. The GED alsocontains analysis of data on educational attainment, technical andvocational education and training, secondary school teachers, andeducation finance.

The analytical chapter is accompanied by 200pages of statistical tables on pre-primary, primary, secondary andtertiary education. The GED 2011 introduces several new tables that didnot appear in previous editions. Table 5 lists national, regional and global estimates of the number and percentof children of primary and lower secondary school age out of school.Table 19 introduces a new indicator of educational attainment, thepercentage of the population 25 years and older with at least completedprimary, lower secondary, upper secondary, post-secondary, or tertiaryeducation. All data from the statistical annex will also be availablein the UIS Data Centre.

Reference

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2011. Global education digest 2011: Comparing education statistics across the world. Montreal: UIS. (Download in PDF format, 7.5 MB)

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 30 October 2011 (edited 31 October 2011), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/10/ged.html

8 September was International Literacy Day. On this occasion, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released a fact sheet with estimates of adult and youth literacy in 2009, the most recent year with data.

Theglobal adult literacy rate, for the population 15 years and older, was83.7% in 2009, compared to 83.4% in 2008. The adult illiteratepopulation fell from 796.2 million in 2008 to 793.1 million in 2009.64.1% of the adult illiterate population were women. Adult literacyrates are lowest in sub-Saharan African and in South and WestAsia (see Figure 1). In 11 countries, less than half of the adultpopulation were able to read and write: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad,Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Haiti, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Figure 1: Adult literacy rate, 2009
World map with adult literacy rates in 2009

World map with adult literacy rates in 2009

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2011

Youth literacy rates - for the population 15 to 24 years - aregenerally higher than adult literacy rates, due to increased school attendance rates amongyounger generations. The global youth literacy rate was 89.3% in 2009,compared to 89.0% in 2008. The youth illiterate population fell from130.6 million in 2008 to 127.3 million in 2009. Youth literacy rates are lowest in sub-Saharan Africa(see Figure 2) and the five countries worldwide with youth literacy rates below 50%are from this region: Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger.

Figure 2: Youth literacy rate, 2009
World map with youth literacy rates in 2009

World map with youth literacy rates in 2009

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2011

Reference

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2011. Adult and youth literacy. UIS fact sheet no. 16, September. Montreal: UIS. (Download in PDF format, 350 KB)

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 30 September 2011, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/09/literacy.html

Global Education Digest 2011

Adult and youth literacy in 2009