Addressing Post-Pandemic Education Inequities: Key Findings on Learning Poverty

The 2024 Learning Poverty update by the World Bank and UNESCO highlights persistent global education gaps, with nearly half of countries lacking comprehensive learning data post-COVID. Efforts focus on improving foundational literacy through new assessments, gender-specific data, and targeted interventions in underserved regions.

World Bank and UNESCO in collaboration with researchers like Marie-Hélène Cloutier, Koen Martijn Geven, Halsey Rogers, and Sheena Fazili, provide an in-depth look at shifts in global education benchmarks across 125 countries. Learning Poverty combines the proportion of out-of-school children with the percentage of primary-aged students who cannot meet minimum reading proficiency levels. This year’s release incorporates significant updates in both assessment data and enrollment statistics, offering a more accurate picture of post-COVID-19 education landscapes. Despite efforts to expand data availability, nearly half of the world’s countries lack comprehensive learning data, underscoring the need for global efforts to improve educational data collection. Among the affected regions, Sub-Saharan Africa shows the highest percentage of data gaps, with about 48% of countries in the region unable to report sufficient learning data. The update draws from new data sources, including PIRLS 2021, a significant international reading assessment, and AMPL-b, a targeted assessment used in select African countries to evaluate learning outcomes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prioritizing Data Sources to Measure Foundational Skills

The methodology for calculating Learning Poverty reflects a careful prioritization of assessment types based on factors like temporal comparability and regional alignment. PIRLS 2021, one of the prominent data sources used in this release, allows a fresh examination of reading proficiency among fourth-grade students across 52 countries, ranging from Australia to South Africa. The study reveals that learning losses and gains are unevenly distributed across regions and even within countries, impacted by variations in school closures, policy responses, and socioeconomic contexts. In Kenya, for example, the new AMPL-b assessment provides the first official Learning Poverty estimate by measuring the percentage of students who meet minimum reading standards. Meanwhile, countries like Pakistan have implemented national learning assessments aligned with international benchmarks, helping to establish new baselines and assess trends in foundational literacy levels. Another new addition to this release is Uzbekistan, where data from PIRLS 2021 enabled the calculation of Learning Poverty metrics for the first time.

Improving Data on Schooling Deprivation through Local Updates

The 2024 update also addresses schooling deprivation through enrollment data adjustments. Enrollment rates, a component of Learning Poverty, reflect the share of children who are not in school. For this update, in cases where traditional Adjusted Net Enrollment Rate (ANER) data was either outdated or unavailable, alternative data from local sources, such as household surveys and statistical yearbooks, was used to provide a more reliable enrollment estimate. This adjustment has implications for the schooling deprivation component of Learning Poverty in several countries. In Côte d'Ivoire, for instance, newer enrollment data provided by the country team led to a revised estimate, while Madagascar’s schooling data now draws from government-validated sources instead of ANER. These updates reveal improvements in data accuracy for countries with previously limited access to consistent enrollment figures.

Assessing Learning Deprivation: Pandemic Impacts and Recovery Trends

Learning deprivation, the second component of Learning Poverty, measures the percentage of children who fail to meet minimum reading proficiency. This year’s data reflects shifts in learning deprivation due to new or updated assessments. Countries like South Africa, with new PIRLS data from 2021, report an increase in learning deprivation that captures pandemic-era challenges such as extended school closures and limited access to online learning. Other nations like Australia, the United States, and Jordan have updated estimates based on more recent PIRLS data, providing a closer look at post-pandemic learning outcomes. In Jordan, for example, the switch from a science-focused assessment (TIMSS) to a reading-focused assessment (PIRLS) captures more specific changes in literacy levels, revealing higher learning deprivation rates than previously estimated. Not all regions, however, experience declines; some, like Finland and Ireland, show resilience or improvement in learning outcomes, indicating the value of robust education systems and targeted interventions.

Building Global Support for Foundational Learning by 2030

In line with the World Bank and UNESCO’s objective of expanding access to learning data, this release includes gender-specific estimates in several countries. Gender-disaggregated data provides insight into disparities, such as in Bangladesh, where updated data shows higher learning poverty among boys. In Morocco, too, gender differences highlight specific needs, with boys showing higher rates of learning deprivation than girls. Such data is essential for addressing targeted gaps in education systems and for informing policies that address gender-related barriers to learning. The update is part of a broader effort, driven by the Coalition for Foundational Learning, to ensure that all children gain foundational literacy skills by coordinating resources and tools to aid countries in tracking learning progress. The World Bank emphasizes that closing the Learning Poverty gap will require a concerted focus on generating comparable, accessible data and prioritizing foundational learning in global policy. The Coalition has committed to expanding assessment tools and training to underserved regions, particularly in low-income countries where learning data remains sparse. This collaborative push for standardized data is fundamental to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure inclusive, equitable education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

This 2024 Learning Poverty update underscores a growing need for global educational equity, with the pandemic’s lingering impact on foundational literacy revealing disparities that many education systems are still struggling to address. While some countries show promising signs of recovery, others continue to grapple with high rates of learning deprivation and schooling deprivation, a dual challenge that risks entrenching educational inequities. The World Bank and UNESCO’s emphasis on data-informed strategies serves as a call to action for stakeholders worldwide to invest in data collection, policy alignment, and targeted interventions that support foundational learning across diverse educational contexts.