Editing Literacy (section)

=== Modern proliferation (1950 – present) ===
[[File:Figure 1 Adult literacy rates have increased Reading the past writing the futureUPDATED.svg|thumb|Adult literacy rates have increased at a constant pace since 1950.]]
Data published by [[UNESCO]] shows that the worldwide literacy rate among adults has increased, on average, by 5 percentage points every decade since 1950, from 55.7% in 1950 to 86.2% in 2015. Due to rapid [[population growth]], while the percentage of adults who were illiterate decreased, the actual number of illiterate adults increased from 700 million in 1950 to 878 million in 1990, before starting to decrease and falling to 745 million by 2015. The number of illiterate adults remains higher than in 1950, "despite decades of universal education policies, literacy interventions and the spread of print material and information and communications technology (ICT)".<ref name="UNESCO-2017">{{Cite book |last=UNESCO |url=http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002475/247563e.pdf |title=Reading the past, writing the future: Fifty years of promoting literacy |publisher=UNESCO |year=2017 |isbn=978-9-231-00214-4 |pages=21–23, 26}}</ref>