As of 2021, South Africa's total literacy rate was around 90 percent, which means 90 percent of all South Africans could read and write. There is literally no definitionThe literacy rate measures the percentage of people aged 15 and above who can read and write. There is no common definition for what counts as being literate; individual countries use individual assessments and standards to define it. Despite this, the literacy rate is an important indicator of the standard of education and thus the standard of living in a country. Sub-standard Sub-SaharaAlthough its educational system does not have the best reputation, South Africa’s literacy rate is well above average among their geographical peers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Illiteracy is still a significant global problem, and Sub-Saharan Africa is not among the leading regions when it comes to literacy and education. In 2011, 32 million children of primary school age did not go to school in that region, but projections see enrollment figures increasing in the future – if true, this could not only improve the region’s literacy rates, but also its standard of living and human progress in general.

In 2023, ***** percent of people aged 15 years and above in Africa were able to read and write a simple statement and understand it. Regionally, Southern Africa presented the highest literacy rate, at around ** percent. North and East Africa had similar shares of literate people, at over ** percent. In contrast, **** percent and ** percent of the adult population in Central and West Africa could read and write.

Abstract

The PIRLS 2011 aimed to generate a database of student achievement data in addition to information on student, parent, teacher, and school background data for the 57 areas that participated

Geographic coverage

The survey had international coverage

Analysis unit

Individuals and institutions

Universe

PIRLS is a study of student achievement in reading comprehension in primary school, and is targeted at the grade level in which students are at the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, which is the fourth grade in most countries. The formal definition of the PIRLS target population makes use of UNESCO's International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) in identifying the appropriate target grade:

"…all students enrolled in the grade that represents four years of schooling, counting from the first year of ISCED Level 1, providing the mean age at the time of testing is at least 9.5 years. For most countries, the target grade should be the fourth grade, or its national equivalent."

As a new initiative in 2011, prePIRLS was developed as a less difficult version of PIRLS to provide more assessment options for developing countries where students may not be prepared for the demands of PIRLS. prePIRLS is based on the same view of reading comprehension as PIRLS but is designed to assess basic reading skills that are a prerequisite for success on PIRLS. Botswana, Colombia, and South Africa administered prePIRLS to their fourth grade students. Colombia also administered PIRLS to the same fourth grade students, providing the basis for a link between the PIRLS and prePIRLS scales.

Kind of data

Sample survey data

Sampling procedure

The basic sample design used in PIRLS 2011 was a two-stage stratified cluster design, with the first stage consisting of a sample of schools, and the second stage consisting of a sample of intact classrooms from the target grade in the sampled schools. Intact classes of students are sampled rather than individuals from across the grade level or of a certain age because PIRLS pays particular attention to students’ curricular and instructional experiences.

Each country participating in PIRLS 2011 needed a plan for defining its national target population and applying the TIMSS and PIRLS sampling methods to achieve a nationally representative sample of schools and students. The development and implementation of the national sampling plan is a collaborative exercise involving the country’s National Research Coordinator (NRC) and the PIRLS sampling experts.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

PIRLS Background Questionnaires By gathering information about children’s experiences together with reading achievement on the PIRLS test, it is possible to identify the factors or combinations of factors that relate to high reading literacy. An important part of the PIRLS design is a set of questionnaires targeting factors related to reading literacy. PIRLS administered four questionnaires: to the tested students, to their parents, to their reading teachers, and to their school principals.

Student Questionnaire Each student taking the PIRLS reading assessment completes the student questionnaire. The questionnaire asks about aspects of students’ home and school experiences – including instructional experiences and reading for homework, selfperceptions and attitudes towards reading, out-of-school reading habits, computer use, home literacy resources, and basic demographic information.

Learning to Read (Home) Survey The learning to read survey is completed by the parents or primary caregivers of each student taking the PIRLS reading assessment. It addresses child-parent literacy interactions, home literacy resources, parents’ reading habits and attitudes, homeschool connections, and basic demographic and socioeconomic indicators.

Teacher Questionnaire The reading teacher of each fourth-grade class sampled for PIRLS completes a questionnaire designed to gather information about classroom contexts for developing reading literacy. This questionnaire asks teachers about characteristics of the class tested (such as size, reading levels of the students, and the language abilities of the students). It also asks about instructional time, materials and activities for teaching reading and promoting the development of their students’ reading literacy, and the grouping of students for reading instruction. Questions about classroom resources, assessment practices, and home-school connections also are included. The questionnaire also asks teachers for their views on opportunities for professional development and collaboration with other teachers, and for information about their education and training.

School Questionnaire The principal of each school sampled for PIRLS responds to the school questionnaire. It asks school principals about enrollment and school characteristics (such as where the school is located, resources available in the surrounding area, and indicators of the socioeconomic background of the student body), characteristics of reading education in the school, instructional time, school resources (such as the availability of instructional materials and staff), home-school connections, and the school climate.

Response rate

For a full table of school participation rates, which vary by country, please see Appendix C on page 262 of the PIRLS 2011 Report.

Abstract

The Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) is a consortium of Ministries of Education and Culture located in the Southern Africa subregion. This consortium works in close partnership with the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). SACMEQ’s main aim is to undertake co-operative educational policy research in order to generate information that can be used by decision-makers to plan the quality of education. SACMEQ’s programme of educational policy research has four features which have optimized its contributions to the field of educational planning: (1) it provides research-based policy advice concerning high-priority educational quality issues that have been identified by key decision-makers in Southern Africa, (2) it functions as a co-operative venture based on a strong network of Ministries of Education and Culture, (3) it combines research and training components that are linked with institutional capacity building, and its future directions are defined by participating ministries. In each participating country, a National Research Co-ordinator is responsible for implementing SACMEQ’s projects.

The SACMEQ I Project commenced in 1995 and was completed in 1999. The SACMEQ I main data collection was implemented in seven SACMEQ Ministries of Education (Kenya, Mauritius, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, Zanzibar, and Zimbabwe). The study provided "agendas for government action" concerning: educational inputs to schools, benchmark standards for educational provision, equity in the allocation of educational resources, and the reading literacy performance of Grade 6 learners. The data collection for this project included information gathered from around 20,000 learners; 3,000 teachers; and 1,000 school principals.

This co-operative sub-regional educational research project collected data in order to guide decisionmaking in these countries with respect to questions around high priority policy issues. These included: • What are the baseline data for selected inputs to primary schools? • How do the conditions of primary schooling compare with the Ministry of Education and Culture’s own bench-mark standards? • Have educational inputs to schools been allocated in an equitable fashion? • What is the basic literacy level among pupils in upper primary school? • Which educational inputs to primary schools have most impact on pupil reading achievement at the upper primary level?

In 1995 there were five fully active members of SACMEQ: Mauritius, Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania (Zanzibar), and Zimbabwe. These Ministries of Education and Culture participated in all phases of SACMEQ’s establishment and its initial educational policy research project. There are also four partially active members of SACMEQ: Kenya, Tanzania (Mainland), Malawi, and Swaziland. These Ministries of Education and Culture have made contributions to the preparation of the Project Plan for SACMEQ’s initial educational policy research project. Three other countries (Botswana, Lesotho, and South Africa) had observer status due to their involvement in SACMEQ related training workshops or their participation in some elements of the preparation of the first proposal for launching SACMEQ.

Geographic coverage

National Coverage

Analysis unit

• Pupils
• Schools
• Teachers

Universe

The target population for SACMEQ's Initial Project was defined as "all pupils at the Grade 6 level in 1995 who were attending registered government or non-government schools". Grade 6 was chosen because it was the grade level where the basics of reading literacy were expected to have been acquired.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

A stratified two-stage sample design was used to select around 150 schools in each country. Pupils were then selected within these schools by drawing simple random samples. A more detailed explanation of the sampling process is available under the 'Sampling' section of the report provided as external resources.

All sample designs applied in SACMEQ'S initial project were selected so as to meet the standards set down by the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement (Ross, 1991). These standards require sample estimates of important pupil population characteristics to be (a) adjusted by weighing procedures designed to remove the potential for bias that may arise from different probabilities of selection, and (b) have sampling errors for the main criterion variables that are of the same magnitude or smaller than a simple random sample of 400 pupils (thereby providing 95 percent confidence limits for sample estimates of population percentages of plus or minus 5 percentage points, and 95 percent confidence limits for sample estimates of population means of plus or minus one tenth of a pupil standard deviation unit).

The desired target population in Zambia was 'all pupils at the Grade 6 level in the eleventh month of the school year, 1995, who were attending registered government and grant-aided schools in the country'. The number of schools and pupils in the desired, excluded, and defined population have been presented in Table 2.2 of the Sample Report provided as external resources. From the defined target population a probability sample of schools (with probability proportional to the Grade 6 enrolment in each school) was drawn. This resulted in a planned national sample of 165 schools and 3,300 pupils. This sample design was designed to yield an equivalent sample size' (Ross and Wilson, 1994) of 400 pupils - based on an estimated intra-class correlation (rho) for pupil reading test scores of around 0.30. In fact, after the rho was calculated for the reading scores, it was found to be 0.3 1 - which was about the same as had been expected At the first stage of sampling, schools were selected with a probability proportional to the number of pupils who were members of the defined target population. To achieve this selection a 'random start - constant interval' procedure was applied (Ross, 1987). In several strata there were some schools with numbers of pupils in the defined target population that exceeded the size of the 'constant interval', and therefore each of these schools was randomly broken into smaller 'pseudo schools' before the commencement of the sampling. At the second stage of sampling, a simple random sample of 20 pupils was selected within each selected school. Sampling weights were used to adjust for the disproportionate allocation of the sample across districts and also to account for the small loss of student data due to absenteeism on the day of the data collection.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The data collection for SACMEQ's Initial Project took place in October 1995 and involved the administration of questionnaires to pupils, teachers, and school heads. The pupil questionnaire contained questions about the pupils' home backgrounds and their school life; the teacher questionnaire asked about classrooms, teaching practices, working conditions, and teacher housing; and the school head questionnaire collected information about teachers, enrolments, buildings, facilities, and management. A reading literacy test was also given to the pupils. The test was based on items that were selected after a trial-testing programme had been completed.

The SACMEQ Data Collection Instruments include the following documents: - SACMEQ Questionnaires - which are administered to pupils, teachers, and school heads. - SACMEQ Tests - which are administered to pupils and teachers (covering reading mathematics, and HIV-AIDS knowledge). - Other SACMEQ Data Collection Instruments - such as take-home pupil questionnaires, school context proformas, and within-school project management documents.

Cleaning operations

All of the team leaders for the data collectors returned the instruments to the Ministry Headquarters (for the attention of the NRC), during the second week after the test administration. Once the instruments were returned to the Headquarters, three data entry staff within the Statistical Section of the Ministry entered the data, using the Data Entry Manager (DEM) a software programme developed at the IIEP (Schleicher, 1995). This software was adapted specifically for the entry of SACMEQ data. The data entry took six weeks and the data were sent on diskette to IIEP in March, 1996. It must be mentioned that at the time of data entry, the earlier version of the DEM structure files was used, and this caused major problems in cleaning the data at a later stage and reconstituting the structure of the files as they were meant to be.

Response rate

The planned sample was designed to contain 165 schools allocated across provinces, as shown in the first column of figures in Table 2.3 of the Survey Report provided as external resources. The achieved sample of schools was 157. The response rates for the sample have been recorded in Table 2.3. The percentage response for schools was 95.2 percent and that of pupils was 77.5 percent. The non-responding pupils were those who were absent on the day of testing. By province, this absenteeism varied from 2 to 12 percent.

Sampling error estimates

In the survey report provided as external resources, standard errors were provided for all important variables. The calculation of these errors acknowledged that the sample was not a simple random sample - but rather a complex two-stage cluster sample that included weighting adjustments to compensate for variations in selection probabilities. The errors were

In 2023, the illiteracy rate among adults aged 15 years and older was almost 32 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. In South Asia, the illiteracy rate was 25 percent. Adult illiteracy rate is defined as the percentage of the population aged 15 and older who can not read or write. Even though illiteracy continues to persist around the world, illiteracy levels have been reduced significantly over the past decades.