Will Every Child Be Able to Read by 2030? Defining Learning Poverty and Mapping the Dimensions of the Challenge
In October 2019, the World Bank and UNESCO Institute for Statistics proposed a new metric, Learning Poverty, designed to spotlight low levels of learning and track progress toward ensuring that all children acquire foundational skills. This paper p...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/258831616162286391/Will-Every-Child-Be-Able-to-Read-by-2030-Defining-Learning-Poverty-and-Mapping-the-Dimensions-of-the-Challenge http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35300 |
| Summary: | In October 2019, the World Bank and
UNESCO Institute for Statistics proposed a new metric,
Learning Poverty, designed to spotlight low levels of
learning and track progress toward ensuring that all
children acquire foundational skills. This paper provides
the technical background for that indicator, and for its
main findings—first, that even before COVID-19, 53 percent
of all children in low- and middle-income countries could
not read with comprehension by age 10, and second, that at
pre-COVID-19 trends, the Learning Poverty rate was on track
to fall only to 44 percent by 2030, far short of the
universal literacy envisioned under the Sustainable
Development Goals. The paper contributes to the literature
in four ways. First, it formally describes the new synthetic
Learning Poverty metric, which combines the dimensions of
learning with schooling and thus reflects the learning of
all children, and it presents, for the first time, standard
errors associated with the proposed measure. Second, it
documents how this indicator is calculated at the country,
regional, and global levels, and discusses the robustness
associated with different aggregation approaches. Third, it
documents historical rates of progress and compares them
with the rate of progress that would be required for
countries to halve Learning Poverty by 2030, as envisioned
under the learning target announced by the World Bank in
2019. Fourth, it provides heterogeneity analysis by gender,
region, and other variables, and documents learning
poverty’s strong correlation with metrics of learning for
other ages. These results show that the Learning Poverty
indicator, together with improved measurement of learning,
can be used as an evidence-based tool to promote progress
toward all children reading by age 10—a prerequisite for
achieving all the ambitious education aspirations included
under Sustainable Development Goals 4. |
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