Impact of education on the global economy

In this project, looking at the data from the mindset of UNICEF, we wanted to explore the relationship that education had on economies of different countries. We used Tableau to drill down the data and come up with some insightful visualizations. Taking a look at the Gross National Income (GNI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) across the globe, we are able to see which countries are the most wealthy and have a good standing economy. Most of Northern Europe, North America, and Australia performed high here while most of Asia and Africa did not.

We further explored this by breaking it out into the income levels which also further showed how parts of Asia and Africa were among the poorest.

So we compared the different education situations in different regions and income levels. By looking at the out of school rates across Primary and Secondary school by income level, the poorer countries tend to have the highest out of school rates with around 20% of students not completing primary school and 60% not completing secondary school. For higher income countries, this was not the case as less than 7% of students were not completing secondary school. Then what did these out of school children do? Enjoying lives or suffering? The data in employment tells us they are working hard but paid less.

By looking at the number of students who did not meet the MPL (minimum proficiency levels), the lower income countries had by far the most from 130-370 million children not meeting the MPL in math or reading.

School enrollment was also the lowest for Secondary and Primary for the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

There is also a higher percentage of females dropping out of Primary school for the Middle East, then Africa and Asia. This could also be due to cultural factors of the particular region.

 For children labor, about 80% of African children were found to be working and if they were still going to school, were working/studying on average about 14 hours a week.

Across the globe, the Central and Southern Asia and Sub Saharan Africa had the highest percentage of people not reaching the MPL.

Rwanda was on the countries in Africa that was investing its money and resources into education. Over the years, enrollment for both Males and Females increased at a similar pace while employment increased dramatically for Females and at a steady pace for Males.

While there was a civil war that broke out in 1990, the GDP growth took a hit. Right around 1995, the GDP began to grow and has been continuously growing till today. 

This is one example of a country that came from a poorer region yet was able to keep a steady growth by investing in the education and future of the country. Therefore from the above insights we would like to conclude that there are still a lot of countries that could use help financially but a great way to start would be to invest in education of children.