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Saturday, March 31, 2012

World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education

UNESCO and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have published a new World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education that illustrates the participation of girls and boys in pre-primary, primary, secondary, and tertiary education. The data show that there has been significant progress towards gender parity since the 1970s. Two thirds of all countries have reached gender parity in primary education but at the secondary level of education girls are still lagging behind. In some countries, girls have the advantage with regard to access to and completion of education. At the tertiary level, female students outnumber male students in many high-income countries.

The atlas is divided into eight chapters that contain a total of 28 maps and close to 100 charts and tables:

Increased worldwide demand for quality schooling
Girls’ right to education
Enrolment and gender trends: primary education
Enrolment and gender trends: secondary education
Enrolment and gender trends: tertiary education
Trends in school-life expectancy
Gender trends: adult and youth literacy
How policies affect gender equality in education

An excerpt from Chapter 7 on literacy is shown below. The map (please click the image for a larger view) visualizes adult literacy rates from the database of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Among countries with data, literacy rates are lowest in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The highest adult literacy rates are observed in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For many developed countries, the adult literacy rate is unknown because these countries have achieved universal primary education and no longer report data on the traditional literate-illiterate dichotomy, focusing instead on the more narrowly defined concept of functional literacy.

The atlas is available in English, French and Spanish. In addition, UNESCO and UIS plan to launch an online e-atlas with interactive maps.

Excerpt from World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education: Map with adult literacy rates

Source: UNESCO, 2012, World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, pages 92-93. - Click image to enlarge.

Reference

UNESCO. 2012. World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education. Paris: UNESCO. (Download in PDF format, 6.4 MB)

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 31 March 2012, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/03/atlas.html

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa

The educational attainment of a country's adult population reflects long-run trends in participation in primary, secondary and post-secondary education. Educational attainment is a measure of human capital - the skills and competencies of the population - and thus an indicator of a country's potential for economic growth. Educational attainment is also closely linked to health, political participation, and other indicators of social development.

Compared to other regions, educational attainment in sub-Saharan Africa is relatively low but there are large variations between individual countries. The graph and table below present data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), published in the Global Education Digest 2011. The values for each country indicate which percentage of the population aged 25 years and older completed at least primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, post-secondary, or tertiary education. For example, in Seychelles, 90% of the adult population completed at least primary education, 67% at least lower secondary education, and 44% at least upper secondary education. At the other end of the distribution is Burkina Faso, where only 5% of the adult population completed at least primary education and only 2% at least lower secondary education.

Sub-Saharan Africa: Population 25 years and older by minimum level of education

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2011, Table 19. - Click image to enlarge.

Among the 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which UIS has data, only seven - Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe - have attainment rates for primary education at or above 50%. In the remaining eight countries with data - Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Senegal, and Uganda - less than half of the population 25 years and older completed at least primary education. For Benin, the share of the population with completed primary education is unknown because the country reported combined figures for incomplete and complete primary education; 16% of the population attended primary education with or without completing that level (see Global Education Digest 2011, Table 18).

Similar to the attainment rates for primary education, attainment rates for other levels of education also vary widely between individual countries. The proportion of the population that completed at least lower secondary education ranges from 2% in Burkina Faso to 70% in South Africa. For upper secondary education, the attainment rates range from 0.5% in Burkina Faso to 44% in Seychelles. Not more than 0.5% of the adult population completed post-secondary education in Burkina Faso and Malawi, compared to 12% in South Africa. Completed tertiary education is uncommon among the population 25 years and older in sub-Saharan Africa. Only one country, Seychelles, has an attainment rate for tertiary education greater than 3%.

Sub-Saharan Africa: Population 25 years and older by minimum level of education

Country	Year	Level of education (%)
Country	Year	Primary	Lower secondary	Upper secondary	Post- secondary	Tertiary
Benin	2002	.	14.3	.	2.2	2.2
Burkina Faso	2007	5.2	2.0	0.5	0.3	0.2
Chad	2004	8.5	5.5	.	3.2	3.2
Kenya	2010	59.4	41.9	36.3	6.3	0.0
Lesotho	2008	40.9	20.9	13.8	5.4	1.9
Malawi	1998	19.8	8.6	5.2	0.5	0.5
Mali	2006	18.6	10.3	5.5	1.9	1.9
Mauritius	2000	48.9	38.9	20.3	7.9	2.6
Namibia	2001	48.5	27.7	17.0	5.3	2.2
Senegal	2006	10.7	7.5	4.9	3.2	0.8
Seychelles	2002	90.3	66.8	44.2	.	7.4
South Africa	2009	76.4	70.4	35.7	11.8	0.7
Tanzania	2002	48.9	6.0	1.6	.	0.9
Uganda	2008	34.6	23.4	8.7	6.8	1.8
Zimbabwe	2002	65.1	45.9	10.3	9.1	1.5

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2011, Table 19.

When interpreting the educational attainment data for sub-Saharan Africa it is necessary to consider that the reported values for some countries are more than a decade old. As younger, more educated cohorts reach age 25, the average attainment rates of the population 25 years and older increase and the situation of some countries is therefore likely to have improved since the year of reporting. In addition, the picture is incomplete because for 30 of the 45 countries in the sub-Saharan Africa region, as defined by UIS, no educational attainment data is available in the UIS Data Centre.

Reference

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2011. Global Education Digest 2011: Comparing Education Statistics Across the World. Montreal: UIS. (Download in PDF format, 7.5 MB)

External links

Friedrich Huebler, 26 February 2011, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/02/ssa.html

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Website changes in 2012

The International Education Statistics blog was started in 2005. Since then, the format has been repeatedly modified and additional features were added. For example, in December 2010, a mobile version of the blog was launched. In 2012, the site will again be revised and some upcoming changes are summarized below.

1. Merger of huebler.info and huebler.blogspot.com

Until last year, I maintained two websites: the International Education Statistics blog at huebler.blogspot.com (Figure 1), and a separate website at huebler.info (Figure 2). The latter was mainly a mirror of articles posted on the blog, presented in a simpler format. For the reasons outlined below, I will close the site at huebler.info in the second quarter of 2012 and redirect all requests for huebler.info to huebler.blogspot.com. During the transition phase, new articles will only be posted on this blog.

Figure 1: Screenshot of huebler.blogspot.com

Figure 2: Screenshot of huebler.info

The simple site at huebler.info had one potential advantage: individual pages contained less HTML code and took less time to load on slow Internet connections. The blog at huebler.blogspot.com, on the other hand, offered several convenient features not available on the other site, including a site search and a labeling system, that make it easy to find content of interest. Perhaps because of this, the number of visitors to huebler.blogspot.com was far greater than the number of visitors to huebler.info.

Given the lack of features and the relatively low number of visitors of the current huebler.info site, I have decided to focus my efforts fully on the blog. If you currently have pages at huebler.info bookmarked, please replace those bookmarks by the relevant pages at huebler.blogspot.com; links to the latter are shown on the bottom of nearly every page at huebler.info. For example, a recent article on school attendance by grade and age in Liberia at http://huebler.info/2011/20110731-liberia.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/07/liberia.html. The guide to integrating Stata and external text editors at http://huebler.info/2008/20080427-stata.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2008/04/stata.html. After the shutdown of the current huebler.info site, all requests for huebler.info will lead to huebler.blogspot.com; any links to other huebler.info pages will seize to function. If you encounter a broken huebler.info link, please email me and I will send you the corresponding URL on the blog. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

2. New labeling system

All articles on the International Education Statistics blog are tagged with keywords or labels, listed at the bottom of each page, that can be used to find related articles. In May 2006, I began using Delicious to label and bookmark all posts. As an example, see this Delicious page with all articles about India on huebler.blogspot.com. In September 2011, after Delicious had been acquired by a new owner, the underlying software was modified and several features, including a tag cloud that I had used on my blog, were disabled. I therefore switched to the labeling system of Blogger. As an example, here is a link to all of my blog articles about India. I have not removed my bookmarks from Delicious but am no longer updating them.

3. Bigger images

The International Education Statistics blog is formatted to fit on displays with a width of 1024 pixels. To avoid overlap with the sidebar on the right of the page, tables and graphs were limited to a maximum width of about 650 pixels. Beginning in 2012, I will occasionally use images that can be enlarged. Below is an example from an article on School attendance by grade and age in Liberia of July 2011. The original graph had a fixed size and could not be enlarged. By contrast, clicking on the graph below will bring up a larger image that adjusts to the size of the display, up to a width of 1600 pixels.

Figure 3: Age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia, 2007

Graph with data on overage and underage pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia

Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.

To summarize, I hope that these changes will make the International Education Statistics blog more user-friendly. If you encounter any problems with the revised design or if you have any other comments, please send me an email or post a comment below.

Friedrich Huebler, 31 January 2012 (edited 1 February 2012), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/01/website.html