Share of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries who are unable to read and understand a simple text. A combined measure of schooling deprivation (out-of-school) and learning deprivation (below minimum reading proficiency), introduced by the World Bank and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2019.
How to read it
Lower is better — readings above the norm count as worse, so they plot downward here.
Measured value over time. Its norm (0.0 % of 10-year-olds) is far off this scale, so the series stays worse than norm throughout — the deviation badge shows the gap.
Each driver linked to this indicator, strongest pull first, on the same timeline above. Markers are the facts that moved that driver. These are modelled influences — treat them as correlational unless a documented causal edge is shown.
Teacher quality is the most proximate in-school driver of foundational reading; improvements reduce (weaken) learning poverty.
Higher, well-targeted public funding supports teachers and materials that improve foundational reading, reducing (weakening) the learning poverty rate over a multi-year lag.
Where present, digital access buffers learning loss (e.g. during closures), modestly reducing learning poverty; absence of access conversely deepens it, so the link is real but low-confidence.
Projected scenarios from the Factrail model. These describe what may happen under stated assumptions — they are not confirmed facts and may change as new data arrives.
Horizon: Jan 1, 2027 – Jan 1, 2030
Under the baseline path, the global learning-poverty rate slowly recedes from its 2022 peak of 70% as post-pandemic recovery spending and the lagged dividends of recent financing reforms (Incheon, FUNDEB) take hold, but it stays far above the SDG 4 norm line of 0% and well above the World Bank's halve-by-2030 ambition. The recovery is constrained by near-flat teacher quality and supply and uneven digital access.
Share of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries who are unable to read and understand a simple text. A combined measure of schooling deprivation (out-of-school) and learning deprivation (below minimum reading proficiency), introduced by the World Bank and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2019.
This indicator’s slice of Factrail’s verified causal web — the people, facts, drivers and welfare indicators it connects to. Select any node to trace a path.
Loading network…
Assumptions
Assumes no new global education shock on the scale of the 2020 closures; that recent financing reforms hold and partially translate into teacher supply and materials over the model's multi-year lags; and that digital access remains unequal and only a weak contributor. Treats the funding-to-learning-poverty link (medium confidence, ~5-year lag) and teacher-quality link (medium confidence, ~4-year lag) as the dominant recovery channels.
This is a projected scenario, not a confirmed fact.
Updated
no links