Global Literacy Rates and Regional Disparities

UNESCO defines literacy, for statistical purposes, as the ability to both read and write a short, simple statement about one's everyday life, and its Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the principal body compiling comparable literacy data across countries. According to UIS estimates published in its 2023 fact sheets, the global adult literacy rate (population aged 15 and older) stood at roughly 87% in the early 2020s, a figure that represents a dramatic rise from about 68% in 1979, the earliest year for which UNESCO produced a systematic global estimate. Youth literacy (ages 15–24) is substantially higher still, above 92% globally, because each successive generation has benefited from expanded primary schooling relative to the one before it — a pattern demographers call the "literacy transition," analogous to the epidemiological and demographic transitions that reshaped health and fertility over the twentieth century. Still, UNESCO estimated in 2022 that around 763 million adults worldwide remained unable to read or write a simple sentence, a number concentrated overwhelmingly in a handful of regions rather than distributed evenly across the globe.