Percentage of children who cannot read by end-of-primary-school age

The share of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand a short passage of age-appropriate material—in other words, those who are below the “minimum proficiency” threshold for reading. This measure is defined as the union of two deprivations: (1) schooling deprivation and (2) learning deprivation. A child is considered schooling-deprived (SD) if he or she is of primary school age and out-of-school. The dimension of learning deprivation (LD) applies only for children in school and identifies those pupils who are below the minimum proficiency level (MPL) for reading, as defined by the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML), measured in standard learning assessments, and reported in the context of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.1.1(b) monitoring. This “union approach” to measurement reflects the choice that all 10-year-old children must be both in school and learning, as reflected in the SDGs.[1] The final learning poverty measure combines the two dimensions in a single indicator using the following formula:
LP=SD+[(1−SD)×LD]LP=SD+1−SD×LD
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[1] For more information, please see: Azevedo, Joao Pedro; et al. 2021. Will Every Child Be Able to Read by 2030? Defining Learning Poverty and Mapping the Dimensions of the Challenge. Policy Research Working Paper; No. 9588. World Bank, Washington, DC. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/35300; https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/brief/what-is-learning-poverty; https://github.com/worldbank/LearningPoverty