Knowledge · SE.ADT.LITR.ZS

Adult literacy rate

The percentage of people ages 15 and above who can both read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life.

Weighted average · not a median

First official point · 1975

65.4

% of people ages 15 and above

Latest official point · 2024

87.7

% of people ages 15 and above

Published World points

1975–2024

Gaps are years without a published World value. The line is not interpolated.

How this series is built

Population-weighted average. Not a median of countries.

Official UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) series, the custodian of SDG 4.6.2, accessed via World Bank WDI. Many high-income countries no longer report traditional literacy statistics. UIS may fill some gaps with its documented Global Age-specific Literacy Projections Model (GALP). This app never computes a world average. Only years with a published World value are shown.

Source

Aggregate: Weighted average · not a median
Producer: UNESCO UIS
Series: UNESCO Institute for Statistics
Series code: SE.ADT.LITR.ZS
License: CC BY 4.0
Fetched: 2026-08-17

Data file Producer homepage