Countries with the Lowest Adult Literacy Rates
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Countries with the Lowest Adult Literacy RatesChad has the lowest adult literacy rate in this ranking at about 22.3 percent, meaning only around one in five adults can read and write. Niger follows at 30.6 percent and Mali at 35.5 percent, with every country in this group falling below 54 percent. All ten are in sub-Saharan Africa apart from Afghanistan, at 37.3 percent, highlighting how low literacy is heavily concentrated in the Sahel and conflict-affected regions. A cluster of countries, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Benin, sit between 37 and 43 percent, showing how widespread the challenge is across the region. These figures stand in sharp contrast to the near-universal literacy of wealthier nations and underline the strong link between literacy, development and access to schooling.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia / UNESCO (countries by literacy rate)
- Coverage
- 10 entities · 10 observations
- Measure
- Adult Literacy Rate (%)
- Last updated
- 6 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked lowest-first, because on this measure a lower number is the better result.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
⚑ Spotted an error in this data? Report it
How these countries rank across all our charts
Each country's page lists its position in every ranking on ANYSTAT.
Cite this chart
Using this chart in an article, report, class or website? Please cite it and link to this page.
Related Charts
More statistics on similar topics