195 Youth Literacy

Definition

Literacy is defined here as being able to read, write and understand a short simple statement related to your everyday life. Youth (here) are people aged 15-24 years old. Some three quarters of a billion people aged 15 to 24 in the world are literate according to this definition; that is 88% of people in this age group.

Data sources

The source of this data is United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) 2004 Human Development Report, Table 11. This in turn draws on the 2004 work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics, and the UNDP-UNESCO correspondence on adult and youth literacy rates that took place in March 2004, in Montreal.

Click here to view detailed data source references

The quotation used is sourced from Koïchiro Matsuura, who is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) Director General. The quote used was part of his message on World Literacy Day in 2001. The longer section from which the quote was sourced reads: “...the typical imagery of literacy is of opening doors or windows, of light and space, of boundlessness. Literacy is inseparable from opportunity, and opportunity is inseparable from freedom. The freedom promised by literacy is both freedom from - from ignorance, oppression, poverty - and freedom to - to do new things, to make choices, to learn.” The quote was sourced from the website below, in August 2006:

http://www.unesco.org/education/literacy_2001/en_dg.shtml

Excel sheets

Below is an explanation of each of the columns in the excel file:

Column A = Unique numerical territory (see 001).

Column B = Region and territory names (see 001).

Column C = Region code (see 001).

Column D = The ISO 3 code, or ISO ALPHA-3 (see 001).

Column E = People aged 15 to 24 who are literate, in millions, in 2002. To calculate this, the number of people aged 15 to 24 who are literate in tens of thousands (taken from source data) is divided by 100. (E = literate people aged 15 to 24 in tens of thousands / 100). Where data are not available, the regional average literacy rate (Column F) is applied to the population aged 15 to 24 (Column G).

Column F = Percentage of the population aged 15 to 24 who are literate, in 2002. To calculate this, the number of people aged 15 to 24 who are literate, in millions, in 2002 (Column E) is divided by the population aged 15 to 24 in millions (Column G), and then multiplied by 100 to make a percentage. (F = 100 * E / G).

Column G = Population aged 15 to 24, in millions, 2002. See the technical notes for ‘Female Youth Unemployed’ for the sources of this data (145).