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Inequality in education

UNDP
See all data and research on:
Global Education

What you should know about this indicator

  • Measures how unevenly educational attainment is distributed within a country. It is the (ε = 1) applied to years-of-schooling data.
  • This version of the Atkinson index uses an inequality aversion parameter ε equal to 1. The parameter defines how sensitive the index is to changes in the lower end of the distribution. In this form, the inequality measure is A = 1 - g/μ, where g is the geometric mean and μ is the arithmetic mean of the distribution.
  • Data are originally sourced from harmonised datasets, including CEDLAS and World Bank (2024), Eurostat's European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (2024), ICF Macro Demographic and Health Surveys (various years), LIS (2024), United Nations Children's Fund Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (various years) and UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2024)
  • This metric is used to estimate the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index.
Inequality in education
UNDP
The measures inequality on a scale from 0 to 1. Higher values indicate higher inequality. Inequality is measured here in terms of the number of years adults older than 25 participated in formal education.
Source
UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 7, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
2010–2023

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNDP, Human Development Report – Human Development Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on
May 7, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hdr.undp.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on
May 7, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hdr.undp.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We calculated averages over continents and income groups by taking the population-weighted average of the countries in each group. If less than 80% of countries in an area report data for a given year, we do not calculate the average for that area.

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  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Inequality in education”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from UNDP, Human Development Report. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/inequality-in-education.html [online resource] (archived on March 25, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Inequality in education – UNDP” [dataset]. UNDP, Human Development Report, “Human Development Report” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/inequality-in-education.html (archived on March 25, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-in-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear