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In spite of the emphasis on education quality in the Sustainable Development Goals, data on learning outcomes that are comparable across countries remain sparse in international databases. This is particularly true for SDG indicator 4.1.1, which measures the percentage of children who achieve at least minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics. As a consequence, disparities between countries and between sub-groups of national populations in learning outcomes are often hidden and policy makers and other stakeholders do not have all the information needed to guide the design of interventions aimed at disadvantaged groups.
In this session, the UIS will present new estimates of the number of children and adolescents who will be unable to read or do math proficiently if current trends continue. More than 617 million children and adolescents of primary and lower secondary age – mainly from sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia – are expected to lack minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics, due to a combination of lack of access to education, early drop-out, and not learning enough in school. The estimates were generated with a newly developed methodology that makes use of a new UIS database that anchors the results of learning assessments carried out in more than 160 countries and territories between 1995 and 2015, in order to make them internationally comparable.
Challenges related to the implementation of learning assessments, as well as the role of the UIS and its partners in the monitoring of progress towards SDG 4 on education, will also be discussed.