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
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.