By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education
SDG 4 indicator 4.6.1 shows the proportion of youth and adults with functional literacy and numeracy skills
Taken together, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a ‘recipe’ for countries to be productive and prosperous, resulting in populations that are well-educated and well-equipped for employment in the 21st century.
We have already discussed some of the challenges to this vision in this series of blogs on the data for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on a quality education and lifelong learning for all. Our blog on SDG 4 indicator 4.4.1, in particular, has stressed the importance of information and communications technology (ICT) skills in an increasingly digital world. But above all, we need to be able to read, write and handle basic calculations.
As things stand, however, we face a global learning crisis that threatens the achievement not only of SDG 4, but also every other goal, from poverty reduction to the enhancement of development partnerships. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) rang the alarm bells last September with the most recent data on learning, revealing that 617 million children and adolescents worldwide – six out of ten – are not reaching minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Continue reading