Learning poverty: Share of Children at the End-of-Primary age below minimum reading proficiency adjusted by Out-of-School Children

The share of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand a short passage of age-appropriate material—in other words, those who are below the “minimum proficiency” threshold for reading. This measure is defined as the union of two deprivations: 1) schooling deprivation and 2) learning deprivation. A child is considered schooling-deprived (SD) if he or she is of primary school age and out-of-school. The dimension of learning deprivation (LD) applies only for children in school, and identifies those pupils who are below the minimum proficiency level (MPL) for reading, as defined by the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML), measured in standard learning assessments, and reported in the context of the SDG 4.1.1b monitoring. This “union approach” to measurement reflects the choice that, as presented in the SDGs, all age 10 children must be both in school and learning. The final learning poverty measure combines the two dimensions in a single indicator using the following formula: LP = SD + [(1-SD) x LD]

Publisher

World Bank

Unit

—

Cadence

Annual

Series

124

Licence

CC BY 4.0

Updated

2026-09-06

Open in the terminal to chart this series, compare it against other publishers, or export it with its provenance.