About 757 million adults can’t read or write simple sentence – UNESCO
A new UNESCO data released Tuesday September 8, 2015 to mark International Literacy Day estimates that there are 757 million adults, including 115 million young people, who still cannot read or write a simple sentence. Roughly two-thirds of them are women.
This is in spite of the international community’s pledge in 2000 to reduce by half the rate of illiteracy among adults, especially women, by 2015.
The information copied to ghanabusinessnews.com says the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) projections also show that most countries failed to reach the Education for All (EFA) literacy goal, underscoring the need for the new literacy target, which is even more ambitious in its current framing within the Sustainable Development Goals.
According to UNESCO, the latest data show that the global adult literacy rate was 85 per cent and the youth literacy rate was 91 per cent in 2013.
“This,” it says, “represents an increase compared to estimates for the reference year 2012, when the adult and youth literacy rates were 84 per cent and 89 per cent, respectively.”
The organization notes that the number of illiterate adults was estimated to be 781 million in 2012, which was 24 million more than in 2013.
Among other things, UNESCO indicates that the reduction in the adult illiterate population to 757 million is mainly due to more recent data for three countries.
It says in India, the adult literacy rate was reported to be 69 per cent in 2011; as a consequence, the adult illiterate population is estimated to be 22.6 million lower than the previous UIS estimate, which was based on household survey data from 2006.
“In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, new data for 2012 led to a revised UIS estimate of the adult illiterate population that is 3.0 million below the previous estimate. In the United Republic of Tanzania, the adult illiterate population is now estimated to be 2.4 million lower than reported previously, due to new literacy data for 2012,” it says.
On the other hand, the number of illiterate adults is estimated to have increased in several countries, including Pakistan (1.6 million more), Senegal (1.0 million more) and Uganda (0.9 million more). The increase in these and other countries can be explained by a combination of factors, namely: more recent data indicate lower literacy rates and the population has grown faster than the literacy rate, UNESCO says.
By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi