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On 11 December 2006, UNICEF released the 2007 edition of its annual publication The State of the World's Children . This year's report, with the title Women and children: The double dividend of gender equality , looks at the status of women today and discusses how gender equality can help achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals . The report argues that gender equality produces a double dividend because it benefits both women and children. Healthy, educated and empowered women have healthy, educated and confident children. Through gender equality women can not only live full and productive lives, they can also improve the lives of their children, their families, and the society they are part of. The State of the World's Children contains detailed statistical tables with data on health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS, education, demographics, economy, women, and child protection for each country. In the area of education, the report lists data for the following indicators: Literacy...

The Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2007 assesses individual countries' progress toward the goal of basic education for all children and adults by 2015 with the EFA Development Index (EDI). One component of the EDI is the adult literacy rate. In countries where the adult literacy rate is not available, the EDI is calculated with a proxy measure: the share of the adult population with at least a complete primary education (UNESCO 2006, p. 201, note 2). A previous article on this site, " Years of schooling and literacy: Can everyone with primary education read and write? ", analyzed data on years of schooling and literacy from 26 household surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results showed that most persons who graduated from primary school or attended higher levels of education can indeed be considered literate and that the share of the adult population with at least a complete primary education is therefore a suitable proxy for the adult literacy rate. The pr...