Are We Really Literate? Six Decades of Literacy and Millions Still Left Behind

By Habib Marwat

Sixty years ago, in 1966, UNESCO stood before the world and declared something bold: that the ability to read and write is not a privilege, but a right. That declaration became International Literacy Day. This year, on 8–9 September 2026, the world marks its 60th anniversary under the theme “Literacy for People, the Planet and Prosperity.” UNESCO will host the global celebration in Mexico City, in partnership with the Government of Mexico, complete with the International Literacy Prizes honouring the programmes making real change happen. It will be streamed online in English, French and Spanish, so that, fittingly, more people can actually understand it.

Sixty years is a long time. Long enough to ask a harder question than “how far have we come.” Long enough to ask: for whom?

Let’s start with the basics, because most people have never actually been told what literacy means. It isn’t simply knowing your alphabet. UNESCO defines it as the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written material, the capacity to function meaningfully in your community, to keep learning, and to realise your own potential. It is not a school certificate. It is the key that decides whether a person can read a medicine label, understand a contract, vote with knowledge, or teach their own child.

Now ask yourself honestly: is that key handed out equally?

Walk into a village in Afghanistan, a nation that has barely known a decade without conflict in the last fifty years and ask a mother whether her daughter is learning to read. Walk into parts of Africa, where for millions of families the next meal is a far more urgent emergency than the next lesson, and ask a father whether literacy is even on his list of priorities. For these people, “Literacy for People, the Planet and Prosperity” is not a theme, it is a cruel irony. You cannot ask a starving child to prioritise a textbook. You cannot ask a family fleeing bombs to sit still for a spelling lesson. Literacy campaigns built in comfortable conference rooms rarely survive contact with a war zone or an empty stomach.

So here is the uncomfortable truth this anniversary should force us to confront: does the current global system of literacy actually change anything for the people who need it most? Or does it mostly celebrate the countries and communities that were already close to the finish line, while the hardest cases, the war-torn, the starving, the displaced, remain permanently “in progress” on a UNESCO report, year after year, decade after decade?

This is the uncomfortable reality behind many global development conversations: we sometimes measure the ability to read without asking whether people have the opportunity to use that ability to transform their lives.

And the numbers should make us pause. UNESCO estimates that at least 739 million young people and adults worldwide still lacked basic literacy skills in 2024. At the same time, four in ten children were not reaching minimum proficiency in reading, and 272 million children and adolescents were out of school in 2023.

So perhaps the problem is not simply that we need more schools, more policies and more literacy campaigns.

Perhaps we also need to rethink where literacy happens.

And then there is the elephant in the room: Artificial Intelligence. While hundreds of millions of people still cannot read a simple sentence, the world’s most powerful nations are racing ahead into an age of AI that writes, reads, translates and thinks faster than any human ever could. So, we must ask: does the motto “Literacy for People, the Planet and Prosperity” still mean the same thing in an AI-driven world? Or is the very definition of literacy quietly shifting beneath our feet, leaving the already-excluded even further behind? If a child in Kabul or a village in sub-Saharan Africa cannot yet read their own language, what chance do they have of ever touching, understanding, or benefiting from the very technology now reshaping education, jobs and power itself? Perhaps it’s time to ask a bigger question: is the goal still just “literacy,” or has the real goalpost quietly moved to something far more advanced, and, worryingly, even further out of reach for those already left behind?

There is a way forward, and it doesn’t start in Geneva or Paris or New York. It starts at the grassroots. Faith-based organisations, cultural institutions, and community centres are already trusted, already present, and already inside the very communities that global programmes struggle to reach. A mosque, a church, a temple, a village elder’s council, these are not sidelines to literacy work. They are the fastest, most trusted delivery system the world already has. But right now, they are underfunded, overlooked, and rarely given real decision-making power. Empower them with resources, training and trust and literacy rates in the hardest places on earth could shift far faster than any top-down international programme has managed in sixty years.

Sixty years of promises. Sixty years of proclamations. Sixty years of prizes handed out in grand ceremonies.

So, on this 60th anniversary, ask yourself: if literacy is truly a right and not a privilege, why, after six decades, is it still the world’s poorest and most war-battered children who are the last in line to receive it, and are we now watching the same gap open all over again, this time in the age of AI?

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