Global Education
A good education offers individuals the opportunity to lead richer, more interesting lives. At a societal level, it creates opportunities for humanity to solve its pressing problems.
The world has gone through a dramatic transition over the last few centuries, from one where very few had any basic education to one where most people do. This is not only reflected in the inputs to education – enrollment and attendance – but also in outcomes, where literacy rates have greatly improved.
Getting children into school is also not enough. What they learn matters. There are large differences in educational outcomes: in low-income countries, most children cannot read by the end of primary school. These inequalities in education exacerbate poverty and existing inequalities in global incomes.
On this page, you can find all of our writing and data on global education.
Endnotes
This data comes from a paper by João Pedro Azevedo et al.
João Pedro Azevedo, Diana Goldemberg, Silvia Montoya, Reema Nayar, Halsey Rogers, Jaime Saavedra, Brian William Stacy (2021) – “Will Every Child Be Able to Read by 2030? Why Eliminating Learning Poverty Will Be Harder Than You Think, and What to Do About It.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9588, March 2021.
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Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/global-education' [Online Resource]
BibTeX citation
@article{owid-global-education,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Veronika Samborska and Natasha Ahuja and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser},
title = {Global Education},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2023},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/global-education}
}
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