Education Around The World

Quality Education is the fourth of the SDGs and aims to create “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all .” Moreover, education is a cornerstone of many other goals, such as Gender Equality. To achieve the targets by 2030, there are several principles set up by the UN¹. The first one states that education is an enabling right and a fundamental human right. The second one declares education as a public good, and the third principle proclaims an inextricable link between gender equality and education for all.

To represent the state of education across the world, we chose three variables:

• The average time a child spends in school.
• The literacy rate
• The enrollment rate in primary education. (Enrollment rates over 100% indicate the share of overaged students due to repetition or late/early school entries)

As the dataset for mean years in school was quite complete, we chose to display the data for 2019. Unfortunately, the other two datasets were quite fragmented, with records for different years. Due to this, we decided to show the most recent record going back until 2010.

Unfortunately, the world is not on course to achieve the 2030 education targets. Before the corona pandemic, the proportion of children and youth not attending primary and secondary school decreased from 26% in 2000 to 19% in 2010. In 2018, it was even down to 17%. Even though these numbers show a favorable development, there were still 258 million children out of school in 2018. Three-quarters of them living in Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

This map reflects these findings, with the vast majority of countries having a primary school enrollment rate higher than 89% and a literacy rate of over 81%. Moreover, in many countries, children spend, on average, more than nine years in school. However, there are notable exceptions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan, which show low enrollment and literacy rates. In addition, to these low enrollment rates there, children also spend significantly less time in school. Thus, the global pattern of education variables unsurprisingly resembles the distribution of highly developed nations, developing countries, and war-torn regions.

The UN expects gender equality in education to have a positive impact on child well-being and development. Moreover, it will contribute to equal employment as well as economic growth. In contrast, gender inequality in access to education has negative consequences for skill development, early marriage, employment, and thus also economic independence.

To represent gender equality in education, we chose the following two variables:

• The ratio of mean years spent in school spent by girls to boys (1.0 means that girls spend the same amount of time in school as boys)
• The ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary education (1.0 means that there is the same amount of girls in school as boys)

To represent the quality of life, we chose the following two variables:

• Life ladder: Respondents should think of a ladder, where the best possible life for them is a 10, and the worst possible life is a 0
• GDP per capita

The variables mean years in school and enrollment were taken into account because they are comparable measures between countries and they highlight important aspects about the education in a given country by giving hints on the accessibility and amount of education. The enrollment rate states how many boys and girls are enrolled and thus indicates accessibility to schools. The mean years of schooling on the other hand gives an indication about the amount of education obtained.

The educational system in a country often reflects existing inequalities. Gender inequality not only negatively influences access to education, but unequal access to education also reinforces gender inequalities in society as a whole. Nevertheless, important achievements have been made in recent years. From the year 2000 until 2015 the number of girls per hundred boys has risen from 92 to 97 in primary school and in secondary school from 91 to 97⁵. Interestingly once enrolled as many girls as boys finish their grades, leaving equality in enrollment as the most important target to achieve more equality in education⁶.

The idea that equality in education is somehow connected with quality of life feels quite intuitive. Studies have shown that gender equality benefits women and men and leads to more societal and subjective wellbeing and quality of life. Equality improves wellbeing because it enables individual freedom of choice, greater social options and control over one's own life⁷. Moreover, education leads to a healthier lifestyle due to more possibilities in work and better economic conditions. Poorly educated people are more likely to experience chronic disease and self-reported poor health and display a shorter life expectancy⁸. For the specific case of gender equality in education, there are findings for the area of Pakistan suggesting that higher literacy rate, primary school enrollment, and gender equality in education are important factors to determine an individual's quality of life directly ⁹.

The map on the front side supports the intuition that equality in education is connected with quality of life. We can observe that countries with high life ladder and GDP values show more equal ratio between men and women and their mean years of schooling . The same relationship applies for the life ladder and GDP values and enrollment rates for boys and girls. An exception is India where they have an equal ratio of boys and girls enrolled and also equal ratio of mean years of schooling but a low life ladder value of 4. The global distribution is characterized by Europe and North America showing high life ladder values and equal enrollment rates and mean years of schooling and countries on the African and Asian continent having less gender equality in education and lower overall quality of life. South America can be seen as the continent in between with relatively high quality of life values and gender equality in education. In Brasil for examples there are even more girls enrolled then boys!

The maps on the last page already indicated some relationship between gender equality in education and higher quality of life measures. The bubble plots support these findings as we can see a moderate correlation between mean years of schooling and GDP as well as the life ladder. We can also observe a difference between continents. In Europe and the Americas, children tend to spend the same amount of time in school, regardless of gender. They also exhibit relatively high values for the quality of life, meaning high GDP and high life ladder values. Thus, these visualizations demonstrate the importance of comparing gender equality in education and quality of life as there are reoccurring patterns over the globe. Generally, more developed countries enjoy more gender equality in education and more quality of life, whereas people in others tend to be in less favorable situations.

Nevertheless, the correlation between gender equality in education and quality of life does not tell the whole story as correlation does not imply causation. It is unclear if gender equality leads to a better quality of life or if better quality of life leads to more gender equality. Furthermore, we only included two measures for quality of life, which do not portray the whole picture. Quality of life is an intricate subject that needs to be better researched and needs more data and indicators with solid worldwide coverage. Gender equality in education is also a multi-scalar subject which we only approximated with two values. It would be interesting to include more subjective data from interviews towards the perceived equality in education and also measures of equal participation opportunities. As we did not analyze the dependencies between GDP and life ladder, their relationship remains unclear. As a self-assessment of quality of life does probably include financial security, the life ladder is, to some extent, dependent on the GDP. Moreover, we did not conduct a statistical analysis which would be crucial for future research.