Learning Poverty
Most children in poor countries cannot read a simple story by age ten.
Severity score
49.0
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Around seven in ten children in low and middle income countries cannot read and understand basic text by the end of primary school, a figure that worsened sharply after pandemic school closures. This is the single largest constraint on long-run development.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
6Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
94People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
90Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
2Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
54Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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