The Causes of Poverty and the Search for Solutions - Education And Literacy

In almost all societies a lack of education and literacy tends to result in a lower socioeconomic status. In its Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2006: Literacy for Life the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) names literacy as a basic human right and affirms its role in improving overall human development indicators at both the micro and macro levels. Nations with high levels of illiteracy tend to have high levels of poverty, and vice versa. Rates of literacy have risen more or less steadily since the 1950s, when 55.7% of the world's population was literate. Since 1970 the most dramatic increase in global literacy rates occurred in youths between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. (See Table 2.4 and Table 2.5.) Despite these gains, illiteracy remains a significant problem around the world. As Table 2.6 shows, literacy has documented links to poverty, yet the global community has largely failed to ensure an educated populace. In 2002 ninety-nine million children did not attend primary school. (See Table 2.7.) Most of these not-in-school children were in developing countries, but developed countries and those in transition have problems as well. For example, according to UNESCO, in 2005 more than 40% of people aged sixteen to sixty-five in Chile, Italy, and Poland had a very low ability to comprehend information from written news sources or from fiction. (See Figure 2.5.)