Adult literacy rate
People aged 15 and over who can both read and write, with understanding, a short simple statement about their everyday life, as a percentage of the population aged 15 and over. UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
UIS figures from censuses, household surveys and UIS model estimates. Most high-income countries stopped measuring literacy decades ago, so they have no value; a missing value is not a rate of 0 or 100. Countries report in different years, so a ranking for one year covers only some countries.
Key facts
- Adult literacy rate in the World was 87.7% in 2024, according to UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
- Armenia had the highest adult literacy rate of 56 countries in 2019, at 100%, and Burkina Faso the lowest, at 29.7%. Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
- Published for 171 places, with figures from 1970 to 2024.
Rankings
Countries by adult literacy rate, 2019
Places with data
World, EU and euro area
Countries
- India
- China
- Indonesia
- Pakistan
- Nigeria
- Brazil
- Bangladesh
- Russia
- Ethiopia
- Mexico
- Barbados
- Ecuador
- Chad
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Sudan
- Burkina Faso
Use this data in your AI agent
Invokely serves this figure to AI assistants through MCP and to code through a REST API, with the source and citation attached. Ask your assistant:
Which places have the highest adult literacy rate? Use official data and cite it.
rank_places {"indicator":"literacy_rate_adult","level":"country"}
GET https://invokely.ai/api/v1/rank?indicator=literacy_rate_adult&level=country