New education data refresh

In response to the devastating impact of COVID-19 on the education systems, our efforts to produce statistics supporting policy development have intensified in the last year.

Education Data Release for SDG 4

We are pleased to inform you that the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released the most recent education data and indicators for SDG 4 on 11th March 2022. The updated country level data is now available in a new UIS SDG 4 Explorer and the UIS Bulk Data Download Service and contains information on around 200 countries.

Our purpose is to provide easy and comprehensive access to information for SDG 4 monitoring and additional data resources can be found on the UIS TCG site here and includes a Reader’s Guide  for the release.

In the Decade of Action, the UIS prioritised increasing data coverage to support effective decision-making. The current data cycle includes new approaches such as combining sources in order to increase coverage – for example for expenditure data and the combination of Household survey based and Administrative data for the estimate of the out-of-school population - and filling data gaps, generating  indicators based on published national sources. These resulted in significant increases in coverage and timeliness, especially for the benchmark indicators, Expenditure in Education as percentage of Total Government Expenditure and as percentage of GDP. A full description of the indicators, sources and technical notes can be found in the Reader’s Guide.

A second phase with the release of data for the Other Policy Relevant Indicators will take place by the end of the month. Regional averages are updated once year and  the most recent values, based on the UIS September 2021 data release, are available in UIS Data Portal and UIS Bulk Data Download Service. Please do note that the data published on UIS Data Portal are from the September 2021 Data Release. 

> View UIS SDG 4 Explorer