“I am in Bangkok at the Asia-Pacific Meeting on Education 2030 (APMED) to find ways to transform learning and meet the skills demand to achieve the SDGs. There is a sense of urgency in the discussions, with references to the global learning crisis that jeopardizes the future of 6 out of 10, or 617 million, children and adolescents who are unable to achieve minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics according to data from the UIS.
But it is the numbers that we don’t have that scare me the most.How many adults in the world lack basic literacy and numeracy skills? The standard answer is that 750 million adults are illiterate worldwide. To be honest, I rarely cite this number, knowing that it is based largely on a single question – “Can you read or write a simple sentence?” – asked in a household survey or census.” Read more at
