International Literacy Day

The international literacy day is held on the 8th of September each year. It was started by UNESCO in 1967 with the goal of promoting the significance of literacy and learning in general, but also to promote public awareness about the problem of illiteracy, which is still an issue for a significant part of the population.

According to UNESCO's most recent available data from 2013, there were 757 million illiterate persons aged 15 and above, 63% of which were women. Illiteracy is the most abundant in South and West Africa, where a 51% of the total number of illiterate persons live.

How do you define a literate person? According to the methodology used in the Census of Population, Households and Dwellings 2011 of the Republic of Croatia, a literate person is considered to be any person that can read and write a simple essay on a topic from everyday life with understanding, regardless of the spoken and written language that the person uses.

According to the data from the Census from 1953, 16.3% of the total population of the Republic of Croatia aged 10 and above were illiterate. If we track the changes in this number through the censuses, we will notice that the number of illiterate persons has been on a constant decline and amounted to 0.8% in 2011. The largest portion of illiterate persons is made up of women, whose share in the number of illiterate persons was by 2.8 times larger than men's in 1953, and 3.8 times larger in 2011. This is mostly due to the fact that women live 7 years longer than men, on average and that in the previous decades they hadn't been as present in the educational system as they are today.

The Census 2011 data show that most illiterate women belong to older age groups. As much as 64.6% of illiterate women were older than 60, while the remaining 35.4% of illiterate persons are made up of men from all age groups and women younger than 60.

If we look at the regional distribution of illiteracy, county of �ibenik-Knin has the largest share of illiterate persons aged 10 and above (2.0%) in the total population of the county, while the county of Primorje-Gorski kotar had the smallest share (0.3%).