28 October 2012

EFA Global Monitoring Report 2012

The Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2012 - Youth and skills: Putting education to work was published by UNESCO on 16 October 2012. As all previous reports, the 2012 edition describes progress towards the six Education for All goals.

  • Goal 1: Expanding and improving comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
  • Goal 2: Ensuring that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to, and complete, free and compulsory primary education of good quality.
  • Goal 3: Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes.
  • Goal 4: Achieving a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults.
  • Goal 5: Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015, with a focus on ensuring girls’ full and equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality.
  • Goal 6: Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.

The Global Monitoring Report 2012 also takes a closer look at skills and skill development programs for urban and rural youth.

Reference

  • UNESCO. 2012. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2012 - Youth and skills: Putting education to work. Paris: UNESCO. (Download in PDF format, 8.8 MB)

External links

Related articles

Friedrich Huebler, 28 October 2012 (edited 9 March 2014), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/10/gmr.html

09 September 2012

Blog translation

Articles on the International Education Statistics blog can now be translated into more than 60 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. To translate an article, select a language from the "Translate" drop-down menu in the sidebar, above the search box.

The translations are provided by Google Translate. They are not always perfect and the formatting of articles is not always preserved. Even so, the translations may be useful for readers who prefer a language other than English.

Related articles

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 9 September 2012, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/09/translation.html

31 August 2012

Guide to creating maps with Stata

Most charts and maps on this site were created with the Stata statistical software package. This guide explains how maps like those with adult and youth literacy rates in 2010 can be created with Stata. The article supersedes an earlier version from 2005 and introduces updated maps with current country borders. For example, South Sudan, which seceded from Sudan in 2011, is shown as a separate country on the new maps. The instructions below are for Stata version 9 or later. Users of Stata 8 are referred to the guide from 2005. The creation of maps is not supported in older versions of Stata.

Requirements

  • Stata version 9.2 or later.
  • spmap: Stata module for drawing thematic maps, by Maurizio Pisati. spmap can be installed in Stata with this command:
      ssc install spmap
  • shp2dta: Stata module for converting shapefiles to Stata format, by Kevin Crow. shp2dta can be installed in Stata with this command:
      ssc install shp2dta
  • Shapefile: A shapefile is a data format for geographic information systems. For the maps in Figures 1 and 2, please download this public domain shapefile from Natural Earth:
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.zip (184 KB, world map with country borders, scale 1:110,000,000)
  • Note: The instructions are accurate for Natural Earth maps version 2.0.0, the most recent version of the maps available in April 2014.

Step 1: Convert shapefile to Stata format

  • Unzip ne_110m_admin_0_countries.zip to a folder that is visible to Stata, for example the current working directory of Stata. The archive contains six files:
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.dbf
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.prj
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shx
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.README.html
    ne_110m_admin_0_countries.VERSION.txt
  • Start Stata and run this command:
      shp2dta using ne_110m_admin_0_countries, data(worlddata) coor(worldcoor) genid(id)
  • Two new files will be created: worlddata.dta (with the country names and other information) and worldcoor.dta (with the coordinates of the country boundaries).
  • If you plan to superimpose labels on a map, for example country names, run the following command instead, which adds centroid coordinates to the file worlddata.dta:
      shp2dta using ne_110m_admin_0_countries, data(worlddata) coor(worldcoor) genid(id) genc(c)
  • Please refer to the spmap documentation to learn more about labels.
  • The DBF, PRJ, SHP, and SHX files are no longer needed and can be deleted.

Step 2: Draw map with Stata

  • Open worlddata.dta in Stata.
  • For the example maps, create a variable with the length of each country's name. The Stata command for this is:
      generate length = length(admin)
  • Draw a map that indicates the length of all country names with this command:
      spmap length using worldcoor.dta, id(id)
  • The default map (Figure 1) is grayscale, it shows Antarctica, there are four classes for the length of the country names, the legend is very small, and the legend values are arranged from high to low.

Figure 1: Length of country names (small scale map, default style)

Click image to enlarge.

  • A second map without Antarctica, with a blue palette, five classes, and with a bigger legend with values arranged from low to high (Figure 2) can be drawn with this command:
      spmap length using worldcoor.dta if admin!="Antarctica", id(id) fcolor(Blues) clnumber(5) legend(symy(*2) symx(*2) size(*2)) legorder(lohi)
  • Darker colors on the map indicate longer country names, ranging from 4 (for example Cuba and Fiji) to 35 characters (French Southern and Antarctic Lands).
  • Please read the Stata help file for spmap to learn about the many additional options for customization of maps.

Figure 2: Length of country names (small scale map, blue palette)

Click image to enlarge.

Alternative maps with more detail

The shapefile that was used for Figures 1 and 2 was designed for small maps. It contains the borders for 177 countries and territories and does not include smaller geographic units like Hong Kong, Monaco, or St. Vincent and the Grenadines. As an alternative to the small scale map in Figures 1 and 2, Natural Earth offers shapefiles with more detail that were designed for larger maps.

  • To create the map in Figure 3, download this shapefile from Natural Earth, which has information for 241 countries and territories:
    ne_50m_admin_0_countries.zip (799 KB, world map with country borders, scale 1:50,000,000)
  • Unzip ne_50m_admin_0_countries.zip to a folder that is visible to Stata.
  • Run this Stata command to convert the shapefile to Stata format:
      shp2dta using ne_50m_admin_0_countries, data(worlddata2) coor(worldcoor2) genid(id)
  • If you need Stata files with centroids, run this command instead:
      shp2dta using ne_50m_admin_0_countries, data(worlddata2) coor(worldcoor2) genid(id) genc(c)
  • Open worlddata2.dta in Stata.
  • Create a variable with the length of each country's name:
      generate length = length(admin)
  • Draw the map in Figure 3:
      spmap length using worldcoor2.dta if admin!="Antarctica", id(id) fcolor(Blues) clnumber(5) legend(symy(*2) symx(*2) size(*2)) legorder(lohi)
  • The map takes longer to draw than the map in Figures 1 and 2 because it is more detailed and shows more geographic units. The names of the countries and territories on the map have a length up to 40 characters (South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands).

Figure 3: Length of country names (medium scale map)

Click image to enlarge.

  • To create the map in Figure 4, download this shapefile from Natural Earth, which has information for 255 countries and territories, including small islands like the Ashmore and Cartier Islands:
    ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip (5.1 MB, world map with country borders, scale 1:10,000,000)
  • Unzip ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip to a folder that is visible to Stata.
  • Run this Stata command to convert the shapefile to Stata format:
      shp2dta using ne_10m_admin_0_countries, data(worlddata3) coor(worldcoor3) genid(id)
  • If you need Stata files with centroids, run this command instead:
      shp2dta using ne_10m_admin_0_countries, data(worlddata3) coor(worldcoor3) genid(id) genc(c)
  • Open worlddata3.dta in Stata.
  • Create a variable with the length of each country's name:
      generate length = length(ADMIN)
  • Draw the map in Figure 4:
      spmap length using worldcoor3.dta if ADMIN!="Antarctica", id(id) fcolor(Blues) clnumber(5) legend(symy(*2) symx(*2) size(*2)) legorder(lohi)
  • The map takes longer to draw than the maps in Figures 1, 2 and 3 because it has the largest amount of detail. The differences between the maps in Figures 3 and 4 can be seen by clicking on the images to enlarge them. Figure 4 has more islands and more detailed shorelines. The names of the countries and territories on the map in Figure 4 have a length up to 40 characters (South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands).

Figure 4: Length of country names (large scale map)

Click image to enlarge.

Software used in this guide

  • Stata: statistical software package
  • spmap: Stata module for drawing thematic maps, by Maurizio Pisati
  • shp2dta: Stata module for converting shapefiles to Stata format, by Kevin Crow
  • ne_110m_admin_0_countries.zip: small scale (1:110,000,000) Natural Earth world map with country borders (184 KB)
  • ne_50m_admin_0_countries.zip: medium scale (1:50,000,000) Natural Earth world map with country borders (799 KB)
  • ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip: large scale (1:10,000,000) Natural Earth world map with country borders (5.1 MB)

Related articles

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 31 August 2012 (edited 18 April 2015), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/08/stata-maps.html

31 July 2012

61 million out-of-school children in 2010

61 million children of primary school age were out of school in 2010, down from a high of over 110 million out-of-school children in the mid-1990s, according to new estimates by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 32 million or 53% of the 61 million out-of-school children were girls.

The trend in out-of-school numbers since 1990 is illustrated in Figure 1. Much of the global progress over the past 15 years is due to developments in South and West Asia, where the number of out-of-school children fell from a high of 41 million in 1998 to 13 million in 2010.

Progress in sub-Saharan Africa, another region with a historically large number of out-of-school children, has been much more modest, by comparison. Here, the number of children out of school decreased from a high of 43 million in 1996 to 31 million in 2010. As a result, sub-Saharan Africa today is home to half of all out-of-school children worldwide.

In relative terms, the global out-of-school rate fell from 18% in the early 1990s to 9% in 2010, in spite of a large increase in the number of children of primary school age over the same period. However, the estimates by UIS also show that the out-of-school rate and the number of out-of-school children have stagnated over the past three years, partly because sub-Saharan Africa is struggling to increase enrolment rates in primary education while being confronted with continued strong population growth. At this rate, the world is unlikely to reach the Millennium Development Goal and Education for All goal of universal primary education by 2015.

Figure 1: Global number of out-of-school children of primary school age, by region and sex, 1990-2010
Global number of children out of school from 1990 to 2010
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, July 2012. - Click image to enlarge.

The regional distribution of children in and out of school is illustrated in Figure 2. The width of each region in the graph indicates the size of the population of primary school age. The height of the bars indicates which proportion of children in each region is in or out of school.

In absolute terms, Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of children out of school (31 million), although its primary school-age population (132 million) is smaller than that of two other regions: South and West Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. In relative terms, Sub-Saharan Africa also has the highest out-of-school rate of all regions. 23% of all primary school-age children have either never attended school or left school without completing primary education.

In South and West Asia, the proportion of out-of-school children (8%) is smaller than in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States, but in absolute terms, the region is home to 13 million out-of-school children, second only to sub-Saharan Africa. More than half of all out-of-school children in South and West Asia live in only two countries: India (2.3 million) and Pakistan (5.1 million).

East Asia and the Pacific has 168 million children of primary school age, nearly as many as South and West Asia, but only 4% are out of school. Still, due to the large primary school-age population in the region, this means that 7 million children are excluded from education.

The remaining regions have significantly fewer children out of school: Arab States (5.0 million), Latin America and the Caribbean (2.7 million), North America and Western Europe (1.3 million), Central and Eastern Europe (0.9 million), and Central Asia (0.3 million).

Figure 2: Global distribution of children of primary school age in and out of school, 2010
Distribution of children in and out of school, by region, 2010
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, July 2012. - CA = Central Asia, CEE = Central and Eastern Europe, LAC = Latin America and the Caribbean, NAWE = North America and Western Europe. - Figure 2 was created with the spineplot add-on for Stata (Cox 2008). - Click image to enlarge.

Related articles

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 31 July 2012 (edited 2 August 2012), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/04/oos.html

21 June 2012

Merger of huebler.info and huebler.blogspot.com

As announced in January, the huebler.info website was shut down in June 2012. As of 21 June, all requests for pages at huebler.info are redirected to huebler.blogspot.com.

huebler.info was mainly a mirror of articles posted on the International Education Statistics blog and nearly all content from the old huebler.info site is available at huebler.blogspot.com. Please use the blog search in the right sidebar, under "Search this site", or the blog archive to find content from the old site. The most popular pages from huebler.info, identified through access statistics collected between January and June 2012, are listed below with the corresponding huebler.blogspot.com URL.

Please replace any huebler.info links in your bookmarks and on your website by the corresponding huebler.blogspot.com links. If you are unable to find content from huebler.info with the blog search, blog archive or the list below, you can contact the author by email at fhuebler@gmail.com. I apologize for any inconvenience caused by the shutdown of the old site.

Education statistics

Stata

Related articles

Friedrich Huebler, 21 June 2012, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/06/blog.html

31 May 2012

Adult and youth literacy in 2010

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released new literacy data in April 2012, with updated estimates of adult and youth literacy. In 2010, the latest year with data, 84% of the global population 15 years and older were estimated to be able to read and write (see Table 1). At the regional level, literacy rates are highest in Central Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. In these regions at least 9 out of 10 adults are literate. Literacy rates can be assumed to be as high in North America and Western Europe but not enough countries in that region collect literacy data to allow the calculation of a regional average. By contrast, adult literacy rates are significantly lower in the Arab States (75%), and in South and West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (63% in both regions). Women are considerably less likely to be literate than men in the Arab States, East Asia and the Pacific, South and West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, the female adult literacy rate was estimated to be 80% in 2010, compared to a literacy rate of 89% for men. As a consequence, nearly two thirds (497 million) of the adult illiterate population in 2010 (775 million) were women.

Table 1: Adult and youth literacy rate, 2010
Region Adult literacy rate (%) Youth literacy rate (%)
Total Male Female Total Male Female
Arab States 74.7 83.3 65.7 89.1 92.4 85.6
Central Asia 99.5 99.6 99.4 99.7 99.6 99.8
Central and Eastern Europe 97.9 99.0 97.0 99.1 99.3 98.9
East Asia and the Pacific 94.2 96.7 91.6 98.8 98.9 98.7
Latin America and the Caribbean 91.4 92.1 90.7 97.2 97.0 97.4
North America and Western Europe - - - - - -
South and West Asia 62.7 74.0 51.8 80.5 86.6 74.7
Sub-Saharan Africa 62.6 71.0 54.2 71.8 76.4 66.8
World 84.1 88.6 79.7 89.6 92.2 87.1
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Data Centre, April 2012

The disparities between regions with high and low literacy rates are readily apparent from the map in Figure 1, which displays the average literacy rate in the seven Education for All (EFA) regions with data listed in Table 1. For a description of the regional groupings, please refer to a past article about the EFA regions on this website.

Figure 1: Regional adult literacy rate, 2010

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Data Centre, April 2012. - Click image to enlarge.

Youth literacy rates, for the population 15 to 24 years of age, are higher than adult literacy rates in all regions as a result of improved access to education among younger generations. Globally, 90% of all youth are able to read and write. Central Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean have reached or are approaching universal literacy among their young population. The same can be assumed for North America and Western Europe, but no regional average is available from the UIS (see Table 1 and Figure 2). The disparity in literacy rates between men and women is generally smaller among the population 15 to 24 years than among the population 15 years and older. Yet, in the Arab States, South and West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, young women remain less likely to be able to read and write than young men. The global youth literacy rate in 2010 was 92% for men and 87% for women.

Figure 2: Regional youth literacy rate, 2010

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Data Centre, April 2012. - Click image to enlarge.

The regional averages can conceal large differences between countries within a region. This is particularly true for the adult literacy rate in the Arab States, South and West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 3). In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the adult literacy rate is below 30% in Burkina Faso and Niger - the countries with the least literate population worldwide - and above 90% in Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, and Zimbabwe.

Figure 3: Adult literacy rate, 2010

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Data Centre, April 2012. - Click image to enlarge.

Disparities between countries within a region can also be observed for the youth literacy rate, but to a lesser degree than for the adult literacy rate (see Figure 4). Similar to the adult literacy rate, the greatest disparities exist in sub-Saharan Africa, where youth literacy rates range from 37% in Niger to 99% in the Seychelles and Zimbabwe.

Figure 4: Youth literacy rate, 2010

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Data Centre, April 2012. - Click image to enlarge.

To make it easier to explore its literacy data, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics has created an interactive visualization that combines a map showing adult and youth literacy rates, a graph with literacy rates by sex, and a scatter plot with the correlation between GDP per capita and literacy. A screenshot of the visualization is shown in Figure 5. The full visualization is available on the website of the UIS. Literacy data are also contained in the recently published World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education by UNESCO.

Figure 5: UIS data visualization with adult and youth literacy rate, 2010

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, May 2012. - Click image to enlarge.

Related articles

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 31 May 2012 (edited 1 June 2012), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/05/literacy.html

30 April 2012

School attendance among 5- to 24-year-olds in Liberia

An article that was published on this site in July 2011, "School attendance by grade and age in Liberia", shows that overage school attendance is very common in Liberia, mainly due to late entry into the education system. The official primary school age in Liberia is 6 to 11 years according to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED). Yet, an analysis of data from a Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) from 2007 demonstrates that the vast majority of pupils in primary and secondary school in Liberia are older than the theoretical age for their grade. For example, nearly three quarters of all first-graders in Liberia are at least 3 years older than the official entrance age into primary education (see Figure 1). 24% of all first-graders are 5 or 6 years overage, 14% are 7 or 8 years overage, and 5% are 9 or more years overage. Children in the last group start primary school at age 15 or later.

Figure 1: Age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia, 2007
Graph with data on overage and underage pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia
Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.

Figure 1 shows the age distribution in the 12 grades of primary and secondary education in Liberia. The same DHS data from 2007 can also be analyzed differently, by single year of age instead of by grade. Figure 2 presents the level and grade attended for the population between 5 and 24 years of age. For each age group, the graph shows the percentage in pre-primary, primary, secondary, and tertiary education. The data for primary and secondary education is further divided into single grades, indicated by shades of blue for the 6 primary grades and shades of green for the 6 secondary grades. In addition, Figure 2 shows how many percent are out of school and for how many percent the level and grade of education attended is missing.

Figure 2: Level and grade of education attended by population 5-24 years in Liberia, 2007
Graph with data on school attendance by age in Liberia
Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.

One surprising finding is the large percentage of children between 5 and 14 years who are in pre-primary education. About half of all 5- to 8-year-olds, 39% of all 9-year-olds, and 28% of all 10-year-olds are in pre-primary education. Even at age 14, nearly 7% are still in preschool. One possible explanation is that parents keep their children in pre-primary education due to lack of access to primary education.

Some children start attending primary education at age 5 or 6 but most children enter late. Even among persons 20 years or older, some are still in the first primary grade. School attendance overall reaches a peak at age 14, when more than 86% are in school, mostly in primary education. Primary school attendance rates are highest among 12- to 15-year-olds; two out of three children in this age group are in primary education. Secondary school attendance reaches a peak at age 19, when 38% are in secondary education; in addition, at least 30% of all 17- and 18-year-olds are in secondary education. Attendance rates for tertiary education are low and do not exceed 2% until age 24, when 4% study at a university or other institution of higher learning.

The percentage of the population that is not in any type of formal education decreases from 44% among 5-year-olds to 13% among 14-year-olds. From age 15, out-of-school rates increase again and among 23- and 24-year-olds in Liberia, 61% and 60%, respectively, are not in school. Lastly, for a small percentage of the DHS sample, the grade and level attended was missing.

Related articles

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 30 April 2012, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/04/liberia.html

31 March 2012

World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education

Cover of the UNESCO gender atlas

UNESCO and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have published a new World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education that illustrates the participation of girls and boys in pre-primary, primary, secondary, and tertiary education. The data show that there has been significant progress towards gender parity since the 1970s. Two thirds of all countries have reached gender parity in primary education but at the secondary level of education girls are still lagging behind. In some countries, girls have the advantage with regard to access to and completion of education. At the tertiary level, female students outnumber male students in many high-income countries.

The atlas is divided into eight chapters that contain a total of 28 maps and close to 100 charts and tables:

  1. Increased worldwide demand for quality schooling
  2. Girls’ right to education
  3. Enrolment and gender trends: primary education
  4. Enrolment and gender trends: secondary education
  5. Enrolment and gender trends: tertiary education
  6. Trends in school-life expectancy
  7. Gender trends: adult and youth literacy
  8. How policies affect gender equality in education

An excerpt from Chapter 7 on literacy is shown below. The map (please click the image for a larger view) visualizes adult literacy rates from the database of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Among countries with data, literacy rates are lowest in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The highest adult literacy rates are observed in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For many developed countries, the adult literacy rate is unknown because these countries have achieved universal primary education and no longer report data on the traditional literate-illiterate dichotomy, focusing instead on the more narrowly defined concept of functional literacy.

The atlas is available in English, French and Spanish. In addition, UNESCO and UIS plan to launch an online e-atlas with interactive maps.

Excerpt from World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education: Map with adult literacy rates
World map with adult literacy rates
Source: UNESCO, 2012, World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, pages 92-93. - Click image to enlarge.

Reference

External links

Related articles

Friedrich Huebler, 31 March 2012, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/03/atlas.html

26 February 2012

Educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa

The educational attainment of a country's adult population reflects long-run trends in participation in primary, secondary and post-secondary education. Educational attainment is a measure of human capital - the skills and competencies of the population - and thus an indicator of a country's potential for economic growth. Educational attainment is also closely linked to health, political participation, and other indicators of social development.

Compared to other regions, educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa is relatively low but there are large variations between individual countries. The graph and table below present data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), published in the Global Education Digest 2011. The values for each country indicate which percentage of the population aged 25 years and older completed at least primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, post-secondary, or tertiary education. For example, in Seychelles, 90% of the adult population completed at least primary education, 67% at least lower secondary education, and 44% at least upper secondary education. At the other end of the distribution is Burkina Faso, where only 5% of the adult population completed at least primary education and only 2% at least lower secondary education.

Sub-Saharan Africa: Population 25 years and older by minimum level of education
Graph with educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2011, Table 19. - Click image to enlarge.

Among the 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which UIS has data, only seven - Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe - have attainment rates for primary education at or above 50%. In the remaining eight countries with data - Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Senegal, and Uganda - less than half of the population 25 years and older completed at least primary education. For Benin, the share of the population with completed primary education is unknown because the country reported combined figures for incomplete and complete primary education; 16% of the population attended primary education with or without completing that level (see Global Education Digest 2011, Table 18).

Similar to the attainment rates for primary education, attainment rates for other levels of education also vary widely between individual countries. The proportion of the population that completed at least lower secondary education ranges from 2% in Burkina Faso to 70% in South Africa. For upper secondary education, the attainment rates range from 0.5% in Burkina Faso to 44% in Seychelles. Not more than 0.5% of the adult population completed post-secondary education in Burkina Faso and Malawi, compared to 12% in South Africa. Completed tertiary education is uncommon among the population 25 years and older in sub-Saharan Africa. Only one country, Seychelles, has an attainment rate for tertiary education greater than 3%.

Sub-Saharan Africa: Population 25 years and older by minimum level of education
Country Year Level of education (%)
Primary Lower secondary Upper secondary Post- secondary Tertiary
Benin 2002
.
14.3
.
2.2
2.2
Burkina Faso 2007
5.2
2.0
0.5
0.3
0.2
Chad 2004
8.5
5.5
.
3.2
3.2
Kenya 2010
59.4
41.9
36.3
6.3
0.0
Lesotho 2008
40.9
20.9
13.8
5.4
1.9
Malawi 1998
19.8
8.6
5.2
0.5
0.5
Mali 2006
18.6
10.3
5.5
1.9
1.9
Mauritius 2000
48.9
38.9
20.3
7.9
2.6
Namibia 2001
48.5
27.7
17.0
5.3
2.2
Senegal 2006
10.7
7.5
4.9
3.2
0.8
Seychelles 2002
90.3
66.8
44.2
.
7.4
South Africa 2009
76.4
70.4
35.7
11.8
0.7
Tanzania 2002
48.9
6.0
1.6
.
0.9
Uganda 2008
34.6
23.4
8.7
6.8
1.8
Zimbabwe 2002
65.1
45.9
10.3
9.1
1.5
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2011, Table 19.

When interpreting the educational attainment data for sub-Saharan Africa it is necessary to consider that the reported values for some countries are more than a decade old. As younger, more educated cohorts reach age 25, the average attainment rates of the population 25 years and older increase and the situation of some countries is therefore likely to have improved since the year of reporting. In addition, the picture is incomplete because for 30 of the 45 countries in the sub-Saharan Africa region, as defined by UIS, no educational attainment data is available in the UIS Data Centre.

Reference

  • UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2011. Global Education Digest 2011: Comparing Education Statistics Across the World. Montreal: UIS. (Download in PDF format, 7.5 MB)
External links

Related articles

Friedrich Huebler, 26 February 2011, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/02/ssa.html

31 January 2012

Website changes in 2012

The International Education Statistics blog was started in 2005. Since then, the format has been repeatedly modified and additional features were added. For example, in December 2010, a mobile version of the blog was launched. In 2012, the site will again be revised and some upcoming changes are summarized below.

1. Merger of huebler.info and huebler.blogspot.com

Until last year, I maintained two websites: the International Education Statistics blog at huebler.blogspot.com (Figure 1), and a separate website at huebler.info (Figure 2). The latter was mainly a mirror of articles posted on the blog, presented in a simpler format. For the reasons outlined below, I will close the site at huebler.info in the second quarter of 2012 and redirect all requests for huebler.info to huebler.blogspot.com. During the transition phase, new articles will only be posted on this blog.

Figure 1: Screenshot of huebler.blogspot.com
Screenshot of huebler.blogspot.com

Figure 2: Screenshot of huebler.info
Screenshot of huebler.info

The simple site at huebler.info had one potential advantage: individual pages contained less HTML code and took less time to load on slow Internet connections. The blog at huebler.blogspot.com, on the other hand, offered several convenient features not available on the other site, including a site search and a labeling system, that make it easy to find content of interest. Perhaps because of this, the number of visitors to huebler.blogspot.com was far greater than the number of visitors to huebler.info.

Given the lack of features and the relatively low number of visitors of the current huebler.info site, I have decided to focus my efforts fully on the blog. If you currently have pages at huebler.info bookmarked, please replace those bookmarks by the relevant pages at huebler.blogspot.com; links to the latter are shown on the bottom of nearly every page at huebler.info. For example, a recent article on school attendance by grade and age in Liberia at http://huebler.info/2011/20110731-liberia.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/07/liberia.html. The guide to integrating Stata and external text editors at http://huebler.info/2008/20080427-stata.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2008/04/stata.html. After the shutdown of the current huebler.info site, all requests for huebler.info will lead to huebler.blogspot.com; any links to other huebler.info pages will seize to function. If you encounter a broken huebler.info link, please email me and I will send you the corresponding URL on the blog. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

2. New labeling system

All articles on the International Education Statistics blog are tagged with keywords or labels, listed at the bottom of each page, that can be used to find related articles. In May 2006, I began using Delicious to label and bookmark all posts. As an example, see this Delicious page with all articles about India on huebler.blogspot.com. In September 2011, after Delicious had been acquired by a new owner, the underlying software was modified and several features, including a tag cloud that I had used on my blog, were disabled. I therefore switched to the labeling system of Blogger. As an example, here is a link to all of my blog articles about India. I have not removed my bookmarks from Delicious but am no longer updating them.

3. Bigger images

The International Education Statistics blog is formatted to fit on displays with a width of 1024 pixels. To avoid overlap with the sidebar on the right of the page, tables and graphs were limited to a maximum width of about 650 pixels. Beginning in 2012, I will occasionally use images that can be enlarged. Below is an example from an article on School attendance by grade and age in Liberia of July 2011. The original graph had a fixed size and could not be enlarged. By contrast, clicking on the graph below will bring up a larger image that adjusts to the size of the display, up to a width of 1600 pixels.

Figure 3: Age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia, 2007
Graph with data on overage and underage pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia
Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.

To summarize, I hope that these changes will make the International Education Statistics blog more user-friendly. If you encounter any problems with the revised design or if you have any other comments, please send me an email or post a comment below.

Friedrich Huebler, 31 January 2012 (edited 1 February 2012), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/01/website.html