Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon for changing the world.” Literacy is a crucial measure of a population’s education. As compiled by Our Word In Data, literacy levels for the world population have increased in recent decades. Over the last 65 years, the global literacy rate increased by four percent every five years – from 42 percent in 1960 to 86 percent in 2015. While only 12 percent of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today, this share has reversed: only 14 percent of the world population in 2016 remained illiterate.

As the graphs of Statista show, there is a notable imparity between regions, such that a 99 percent literacy rate has been reached in most developed countries across Europe and the former Commonwealth of Independent Nations as well as in Argentina and Uruguay. Developing countries, especially emerging markets, are catching up. In 2018, Brazilian literacy stood at 93 percent, compared with 97 percent in China and 74 percent in India. South Asia is growing, too, with an overall literacy rate of 74 percent, compared to the Middle East and North Africa at 80 percent. The pacific, East Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean have 96 percent and 94 percent literacy rates, respectively. 

However, some regions have not witnessed much growth.n Afghanistan, the literacy rate is 37 percent, and only 35 percent in South Sudan. In some places, literacy fell recently due to conflicts disrupting school education. In Mali, an already low literacy rate of 35 percent in 2018 dropped to only 31 percent in 2020. Sadly in regions with low literacy, women have the highest illiteracy rate. In 2020, only 87 percent of the world's women over the age of 15 could read while the rate was much higher for men, as 90 percent of them could read. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap was even more significant at 72 percent of males and only 59 percent of females reaching literacy.