this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category

It's a very thin data set. One entry for 2000. Nothing beforehand. Then nothing for 12 years that just happen to occur during the height of invasion and mass displacement of the population.

Wikipedia would suggest the literacy rate was high prior to 2000. After the invasion, there's very mixed data, with high enrollment rates conbined with high dropout and grade repeat rates. But it's an article plagued with dead links, so...

I don't think it's controversial to say the war and mass displacement resulted in declining standards for education.

[–] Nautalax@lemmy.world 9 points 18 hours ago

It’s a very thin data set. One entry for 2000. Nothing beforehand. Then nothing for 12 years that just happen to occur during the height of invasion and mass displacement of the population.

I’m happy to see any data you have, that’s why I looked because 99% seemed incredibly high and the drop to 50% horrible and I wanted to check out that data. I agree this is sparse though it does ultimately come from UNESCO. There is a point on the 15-24 year old female youth graph for 2006 which is in the middle of that and another on 2011, which were the 72-73% I acknowledged. A decline of 8% for the youth until it started recovering in 2012 onward is what this particular source gives.

Wikipedia would suggest the literacy rate was high prior to 2000. After the invasion, there’s very mixed data, with high enrollment rates conbined with high dropout and grade repeat rates. But it’s an article plagued with dead links, so…

Where that Wikipedia article says “literacy levels were high” you can see that it also links to links to World Bank Open Data - the same source I used - except unsuccessfully. I would disagree that it was high based on World Bank Open Data though. If you look up global 15+ year old women’s literacy rates, the global average in 2000 was 76% so 64% in Iraq looks kind of bad comparatively.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say the war and mass displacement resulted in declining standards for education

I agree and that matches up with the drop in literacy rates for young women (whose ongoing education you would expect to be more affected by war in eight years of their childhood than for the adults). I was commenting just with respect to the stats because I was surprised.

[–] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 0 points 11 hours ago

Either way the war fucked up Iraq in ways that will take generations to fix.