Global Education Digest 2011: Comparing education statistics across the world

Produced by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the 2011 Global Education Digest (GED) presents a wide range of indicators on the extent to which girls and boys are enrolling and completing secondary education. It describes trends in participation/completion of lower and upper secondary education from 1970 to the present, as well as disparities in access to education of children of secondary school age. The report reveals that two out of three children in Africa are left out of secondary school and how governments are struggling to meet the rising demand for secondary education, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are enough school places for just 36% of children of age to enrol. Globally, secondary schools have been accommodating almost one hundred million more students each decade, with the total number growing by 60% between 1990 and 2009. But the supply is dwarfed by demand as more countries approach universal primary education. In 2009, 88% of children enrolled in primary school reached the last grade of this level of education, compared to 81%. Yet, in 20 countries — mostly in sub-Saharan Africa — a child in the last grade of primary school has a 75% chance at best of making the transition to lower
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