HOW UNEQUAL ARE EDUCATION OUTCOMES?
There is a huge variation in a student’s likely education outcomes depending on where in the world they live.
If we look at one of the most basic indicators, literacy, you can see how unequal education outcomes are in our world and how that inequality is growing.
The graph of where the world’s illiterate young people live (the number of 15–24 year olds that cannot read and write) shows a clear shift.
In 1991 one in four (25%) of the world’s illiterate young people were African; now three in five of all the world’s young illiterate people are African (60%). [1]
There has been significant progress in ending illiteracy in the rest of the world but not in Africa.
There are several non-African counties, such as Afghanistan, where totalitarian states and embedded conflict have caused the number of illiterate young people to also increase. However, in Africa, there is a widespread continental increase across the continent.
Overall, the number of 15-24 year old Africans who are illiterate has increased from 41 million to 53.8 million since 1991 [2], despite new technologies and world GDP more than doubling in that time. [3]
Young people in the world today are 5.2 times more likely to be illiterate if they are African rather than non-African (up from 2.3 in 1991). [4]
It is important to remember this is the average; young Africans with disabilities, or from ethnic minorities or rural areas are even more likely to be illiterate as UNESCO’s informative World Inequality Database shows so clearly.
Comparing Countries
The disparity in basic literacy rates between countries in Africa and the United States and the United Kingdom in this graph is completely unacceptable.
But it gets worse, whilst this is the current data for African countries the UK literacy rate is from 1890 and the US literacy from 1870, just after the American Civil War.
For a country like Chad today literacy levels are less than a third of the rates when Little Women was written in the US and when Queen Victoria was on the British throne. [5]
This is how long young people in Africa have been losing out, through previous (and unrectified) historical injustices and now through current (and increasing) modern injustices.
In fact in all the African countries in the graph the current youth literacy rate for 15-24 year olds today is also lower than the US and UK 18th century adult literacy rates. [6]
This means that even if the world finally moves to universal school education today, the literacy injustice would continue for another half century at least without adult education programmes.
However, the world is far from universal school education, indeed with the recent increases in out of school children, youth literacy rates may even get worse when the next data is released.
Devastating Impact of Illiteracy
Illiteracy has a major impact, being unable to read the news or write a few sentences changes the path of your entire life. Illiteracy means a young person will most likely only ever get the lowest paid jobs and it brings huge risks to their future health and indeed any future children’s health.
Unequal education outcomes on this level is devastating for national economic growth, and will only further increase the wide inequality between the world’s education budgets.
Impact on Protest
Critically, illiteracy also makes it very difficult for a young person to effectively protest against the injustices they face. What can a young African forced into child labour to survive do to protest their situation?
Some of the 20 percent of children in Africa [7] who are child labourers will likely have mined minerals used to make devices this article is being read on. However, despite the global boom in communications, their voices and realities don’t often appear on those device screens.
The lived experiences of African child labourers are rarely on the minds of other young people in Gen Z and are even more rarely are they on the minds of the leaders who decide on resource allocations in our world.
With the restricted ability of child labourers and other marginalised children to effectively protest or even have their voices heard, it is clear that unless and until there is greater solidarity between young people worldwide the situation is unlikely to change.
The US illiteracy data in 1870 was itself incredibly unequal: 89 percent of the white adult population was literate but only 20 percent of the black adult population [8]. Whilst there are still significant racial inequalities in education in the US [9], the situation improved thanks to the civil rights and racial justice movements, where students and young people were critical participants.
The world has not yet made a similar difference in terms of the exploitation, discrimination and structural injustices faced by children in Africa.
In the absence of a united youth movement, education inequality will remain for generations to come.
Sources
1. & 2. UNESCO UIS, ‘IllPop_Ag15t24.. Youth illiterate population, 15-24 years, both sexes (number)’- Get data here – for 1991 gives 41,135,778 SDG region North Africa and SDG region sub-Saharan Africa combined against a World total of 166,666,496 for a percentage of 24.68% & for 2023 gives 53,794,509 SDG region North Africa and SDG region sub-Saharan Africa combined against a World total of 88,328,624 for a percentage of 60.90%
3. World Bank ‘GDP (constant 2015 US$) – Indicator NY.GDP.MKTP.KD’ – Get data here – gives 1991 GDP as $36.49 trillion and 2023 GDP as $93.35 a multiple of 2.55
4. UNESCO UIS, ‘IllPop_Ag15t24.. Youth illiterate population, 15-24 years, both sexes (number)’- Get data here – for 1991 gives 41,135,778 SDG region North Africa and SDG region sub-Saharan Africa combined against a Rest of the World total of 125,530,718 & for 2023 gives 53,794,509 SDG region North Africa and SDG region sub-Saharan Africa combined against a Rest of the World total of 34,534,115 & UN Population Division,’File POP/02-1: Total population (both sexes combined) by five-year age group, region, subregion and country, annually for 1950-2100 (thousands)’ – Get data here – {Adding 15-19 and 20-24} gives 15-24 populations for Africa and Rest of the World to work out a increased change of being illiterate of 2.27 in 1991 and 5.22 in 2023 32.4% for Africa in 1991 and 14.2% for the rest of the world in 1991 a multiple of 2.27 and in 2021 gives 18.6% for Africa and 3.6% for the rest of the world in 2021 a multiple of 5.22
5. WORLD BANK ‘Indicator: Literacy Rate, Adult total (% of people ages 15 and above) – SE.ADT.LITR.ZS’ – Get data here – gives an adult literacy rate of 27% for Chad in 2022 & CLARK, GREGORY, ‘The great escape: The industrial revolution in theory and history’ – Scientific Figure on ResearchGate – Read more here shows a rate for adult men and women of both over 90% & MINTZ, STEVEN ‘The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Statistics Education in America, 1860-1950’ – Read more here – gives a US adult illiteracy rate of 20% (so a literacy rate of 80%) for 1870. Little Women was published in 1868 and 1869 and Queen Victoria was on the throne in 1890.
6. UNESCO, ‘Youth literacy rate, population 15-24 years, both sexes (%)’ – Get data here gives the highest of the countries in the graph as Senegal with 78.14% and 5 countries below 50%
7. International Labour Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, ‘Child Labour: Global estimates 2024, trends and the road forward’, (ILO and UNICEF, New York, 2025. License: CC BY 4.0) – Read more here – gives the child labour rate for Africa in 2024 as 19.8%
8. MINTZ, STEVEN ‘The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Statistics Education in America, 1860-1950’ – Read more here
9. National Centre for Education Statistics, ‘120 years of Literacy’ – Read more here
