Global Issues

Famine

Illiteracy around the world

• Over 60% of adults in the US prison system read at or below the fourth grade level.
• 85% of US juvenile inmates are functionally illiterate.
• Every year 100000 puplis in the UK leave school illiterate.
• In the UK the prison population is some 85,000. More than three-quarters of them cannot read, write or count to the standard expected of an 11-year-old.
• West Africa has the highest number of illiterates in the world according to a study.
• Approximately 776 million adults – most of them women – have no secure command of the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy” whiles seventy-five million children are not in school.