Global Monitoring Report 2006 - Literacy for Life

Global Monitoring Report 2006 - Literacy for Life

As in previous years, the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report examines progress towards 6 EFA goals.

The year 2005 was particularly significant:

~ the goal to achieve gender parity in primary and secondary education by 2005 has not been met, despite very rapid progress, especially in a number of low-income countries.

~ the vast majority of the world’s 771 million adult illiterates live in three regions: South and West Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and sub-Saharan Africa.

~ women continue to constitute a majority of the world’s illiterates:
64% - unchanged from 1990. At the global level, only 88 adult women are considered literate for every 100 adult men.

~ progress towards mass literacy is especially marked in the 15-24 age group, where expanded access to formal schooling helped raise the global literacy rate from 75% to 88% between 1970 and 2000–2004; the corresponding rates for developing countries were 66% and 85%.

Conventional literacy data show that the global literacy rate increased from:
56% in 1950
70% in 1980
75% in 1990
82% in 2000–2004
It is expected to reach about 86% by 2015

Worldwide, the adult literacy rate increased at a faster pace in the 1970s than in subsequent decades. In sub-Saharan Africa, South and West Asia, and the Arab States, literacy rates increased by more than 10% between 1990 and 2000.

Today, more than 80% of the global population over age 15 is reported to possess at least minimal reading and writing skills. This reflects an unprecedented social transformation since the mid-19th century, when only about 10% of the world’s adults could read or write.

The dramatic increase in adult literacy rates happened despite the quintupling of the world population, from about 1.2 billion in 1850 to over 6.4 billion today.