National literacy trends, 1985-2015
The report Adult and Youth Literacy: National, Regional and Global Trends, 1985-2015 by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) provides literacy data for 151 countries for the years since 1985. In addition to historical data, the UIS report contains projections for 2015, the target year of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals . Regional trends in adult literacy were discussed previously on this site. This article takes a closer look at national trends in adult and youth literacy. Figures 1 and 2 present all national literacy data from the UIS database for the period 1985 to 2015 by region. Each line represents the data for one country. Single markers mean that only data for one year was available for a country. The first eight segments of each figure contain data for the countries within each region: Arab States, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe, South and Wes...