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Data

School completion rates

by level of education and gender
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Global Education
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School completion rates

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What you should know about this indicator

  • This indicator estimates the share of children who complete a given level of education, even if they do so later than the expected age.
  • For example, if the official age of completion for primary school is 11 years old, a child who completes it at 14 years old would still be included. This is to account for the fact that some children may start school late, or have to repeat years.
  • The data sources include household surveys, censuses, and administrative records, with modelled adjustments to improve comparability across countries.
  • These estimates are produced using a statistical model that draws on these sources, filling gaps where direct observations are missing or inconsistent.
  • Because values are estimated, they may differ from official national figures. Differences in school systems or grade structures can also affect comparability.
Share of children that have completed primary school
The share of children who are three to five years older than the official age for the last grade of education who have successfully completed it. This broader age band is used to include children who started school late or had to resit particular years.
Source
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 1, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1990–2024
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNESCO Institute for Statistics – UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) - Education

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the official and trusted source of internationally-comparable data on education, science, culture and communication. As the official statistical agency of UNESCO, the UIS produces a wide range of state-of-the-art databases to fuel the policies and investments needed to transform lives and propel the world towards its development goals. The UIS provides free access to data for all UNESCO countries and regional groupings from 1970 to the most recent year available.

Retrieved on
May 1, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/resources/bulk
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Education, https://uis.unesco.org/bdds, 2025

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the official and trusted source of internationally-comparable data on education, science, culture and communication. As the official statistical agency of UNESCO, the UIS produces a wide range of state-of-the-art databases to fuel the policies and investments needed to transform lives and propel the world towards its development goals. The UIS provides free access to data for all UNESCO countries and regional groupings from 1970 to the most recent year available.

Retrieved on
May 1, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/resources/bulk
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Education, https://uis.unesco.org/bdds, 2025

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of children that have completed primary school”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/school-completion.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of children that have completed primary school” [dataset]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) - Education” [original data]. Retrieved April 10, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/school-completion.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/school-completion.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&level=primary&sex=both", encoding("utf-8") clear