World literacy rate
Literacy is a key skill and a key measure for educating the population. In 1820, only 12% of the world’s people could read and write. Today, only 17% of the world’s population remains illiterate. The literacy rate in the world is growing.
Despite the significant expansion of access to basic education around the world and the constant reduction of educational inequalities, humankind has significant challenges ahead. In the world’s poorest countries, access to basic education is such that large sections of the population remain illiterate. This limits the development of the entire society. For example, in Niger, the youth literacy rate (15-24 years old) is 36.5%.
World literacy rates are growing steadily
The earliest forms of writing appeared five to five and a half thousand years ago, but literacy for centuries remained the lot of the elite – the technology of exercising power. Only in the Middle Ages, along with the development of printing, did the literacy level of people in the Western world begin to change. In fact, the ambitions of universal literacy of the Enlightenment era were able to come closer to reality in the 19th and 20th centuries in the early industrial countries, notes OurWorldInData.
The goal is to ensure that all young people and a significant proportion of adults, both men and women, can read, write and count by 2030.
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