Finally got a free day to work on some interesting info again. This time I was curious to know the Female Youth Literacy Rate in ASEAN Member Nations. With a few clicks, i could easily export data from The World Bank’s data repository.
Youth (15-24) literacy rate (%). Female is the number of females age 15 to 24 years who can both read and write with understanding a short simple statement on their everyday life, divided by the female population in that age group. Generally, ‘literacy’ also encompasses ‘numeracy’, the ability to make simple arithmetic calculations. – The World Bank
The data wasn’t available for all the countries for the same interval of time. Out of 9 ASEAN member nations, SIngapore has the highest youth female literacy rate (99.88% in 2013) while Lao PDR had the least (78.74 in 2005). The situation might have improved in Lao as the data is a decade old.
While 7 member nations – Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines enjoy more than 95% female youth literacy rate, 2 member nations – Lao PDR and Cambodia have less than 90% youth female literacy rate.
Any organizations working in the development of young women in the region can focus more on strengthening young women from Lao PDR and Cambodia.
I will come up with the male and female comparison in my next blog post.