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• Literacy is the ability to read, write, compute, and use technology at a level that enables an individual to reach his or her full potential as a parent, employee, and community member.
• There are 774 million adults around the world who are illiterate in their native languages.
• Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women.
• In the U.S., 30 million people over age 16 — 14 percent of the country’s adult population — don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level or fill out a job application.
• The United States ranks fifth on adult literacy skills when compared to other industrialized nations.
• Adult low literacy can be connected to almost every socio-economic issue in the United States:
• More than 60 percent of all state and federal corrections inmates can barely read and write.
• Low health literacy costs between $106 billion and $238 billion each year in the U.S. — 7 to 17 percent of all annual personal health care spending.
• Low literacy’s effects cost the U.S. $225 billion or more each year in non-productivity in the workforce, crime, and loss of tax revenue due to unemployment.
• Globally, illiteracy can be linked to:
• Gender abuse, including female infanticide and female circumcision
• Extreme poverty (earning less than $1/day)
• High infant mortality and the spread of HIV/Aids, malaria, and other preventable infectious diseases

The Impact of Low Literacy*

• A high school graduate earns about 35% more than someone without a HS diploma;
• Limited literacy skills of employees cost businesses and taxpayers $20 billion annually in lost wages, profits and productivity;
• One in five adults can’t read patient brochures; for the elderly it’s two out of five; Providing medical services to people with low literacy is estimated to cost $8–12 billion a year nationally;
• Citizens with low-literacy are half as likely to vote as are more literate citizens;
• Children whose parents have low literacy levels are twice as likely than other children to have low skills themselves;
• 50% of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons have low literacy skills and/or lack a high school diploma.
• Forty-three percent of adults with minimal literacy skills live in poverty, compared to four percent of people reading at a high school level.
• Only one out of five adults in the lowest literacy level volunteers to work in a community organization every month.  Almost half of those with the highest skills do. 
• Among citizens with low literacy skills, fewer than one in three vote; eight out of 10 people with the highest skills vote.

*Data collected from a variety of sources including 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, The State of Literacy in America: Estimates at the Local, State and National Levels, National Institute for Literacy, 1998 (based on the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey), U.S Census, LiteracyNOW, and the National Center for Education Statistics.