New Delhi, 1 April 2026 – The number of children and young people out of school has risen for the seventh consecutive year, up to 273 million, driven by population growth, crises, and shrinking budgets. This is the main finding of UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report – launched on 25 March 2026 at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, France.
As the report notes, “Three out of four of all children and youth out of school are now either in Central and Southern Asia or Sub Saharan Africa”, a reflection of how progress in reducing out-of-school rates stalled in 2015.
A significant share of the slowdown can be attributed to declining participation during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in South Asia. The impact was even more severe for younger children, as reflected in the net enrolment rate of pre-primary-age children (typically 3- to 5-year-olds). Similar declines in pre-primary participation were also observed in Northern America, sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia.
This report confirms an alarming trend, with more and more young people deprived of education around the world each year. However, there is hope. Since the year 2000, enrolment in primary and secondary education has increased overall by 30%, and many countries are making meaningful progress. UNESCO remains fully mobilized to collaborate with governments and partners to expand learning opportunities for all, in ways that respond to local realities and give every learner a fair chance to build their future.
Khaled El-EnanyDirector-General of UNESCO
Enrolment and Completion
South Asia – a long with Central Asia – has been widely praised for its strong advances in enrolment and completion.
Enrolment increased by 29 per cent in primary, 51 per cent in lower secondary and 114 per cent in upper secondary education. This performance exceeds that of other regions, helped in part by much slower growth in the school-age population, which the United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 indicates is expected to decline even further till 2050.
This progress may also be linked to measures such as those in India, where state-level committees monitor fees at non-state institutions to prevent excessive educational costs, alongside increased public investment through scholarships and financial aid that has contributed also to the participation of disadvantaged groups.
Health-based interventions have also yielded positive results in improving participation. In Sri Lanka, for instance, evaluations of malaria initiatives found that the incidence rate fell by 55 per cent, alongside a 62.5 per cent reduction in school absenteeism due to malaria – an important outcome in light of cross-country analysis showing that countries with intensive malaria burden have 54 per cent lower primary completion rates than those without.
On the other hand, between 1990 and 2024, Central and South Asia recorded faster growth in completion rates than other regions. For example, Nepal achieved a remarkable 81 per cent increase in lower secondary completion, a sharp contrast to its performance in 2000.
Still, debates around grade retention take centre stage in South Asia, dividing policymakers between those who see it as a mechanism to maintain quality standards and those who argue it worsens educational inequality. Repetition often leads to over-age enrolment – a well-established predictor of dropout, as seen in Bangladesh – partly because social norms tend to pull adolescent boys into work and adolescent girls into marriage when they are older than their grade level.
It is in this context that the question of gender gaps also comes to the fore, with girls still trailing boys in secondary completion. A key factor is the region’s high rate of child marriage: while the global share of women married before age 18 fell from 25 per cent in 1995 to 19 per cent in 2024, it remains at 25 per cent in Central and South Asia, contributing to persistent dropout rates among girls.
Inclusive Access to Education
A new index assessing the equity orientation of countries’ education systems – based on the presence of redistributive financing policies – shows that Bhutan, India, Nepal and Maldives score particularly high, placing them among the most advanced globally.
Bhutan also goes beyond financing policies by making education more flexible through its 2012 qualifications framework, which standardizes learning across all types of providers, facilitates credit transfers, and recognizes formal, non-formal, and informal learning
South Asia – along with Central Asia – also has a highly developed decentralised system for allocating education funds to subnational governments. While the global share of such transfers is 58 per cent, it reaches 71 per cent in the region.
However, 17 per cent of countries in Central and Southern Asia still have laws mandating the segregation of children with disabilities into separate education settings, compared with a global average of 9 per cent – a factor that hampers the region’s inclusiveness scores.
Nevertheless, South Asia fares better than the global average, with 29 per cent of countries having inclusive education laws and 57 per cent having inclusive education policies, compared with 24 per cent and 37 per cent globally.
read more: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/south-asia-has-high-out-school-rates-yet-learners-who-enter-school-continue-through-and-succeed?hub=701
