Illiteracy affects over 785 million adults worldwide, translating into one in every five people on the planet, with either no or just basic reading skills. Two-thirds of the illiterate population is women. Africa, as a whole continent, has less than a 60% literacy rate. 42% of African people do not know how to spell their own name. Although 98% of illiterate people are concentrated in three key areas: South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab States, developed nations are also facing a growing illiteracy problem. In some developed countries, a few people drop from high school and do not go to post-secondary school to study. In the U.S. over 93 million people have basic or below basic literacy skills. Three possible causes of illiteracy include poverty, family who are illiterate and learning disability.
The main possible cause of illiteracy is poverty. Some people in the world are poverty. They do not afford food and they even do not have place to live. Those people can't make ends meet with his meager income so they do not have enough money to support their child to acquire high quality education, such as refugees. For example, there was a big earthquake in Haiti. The natural disaster destroyed people's house and school. ''The death and injury of about 15% of more than 2.5 million people in Portau- Prince and its urban agglomeration, and the roughly 1.5 million people now homeless, is a consequence of many decades of unsupervised construction permitted by a government oblivious to its plate-boundary location. Seismologists have written and spoken extensively about the possibility of damaging earthquakes occurring on this part of the Caribbean plate boundary. Even had there been listeners empowered to act on these warnings, it is clear in hindsight that the monumental problem of retrofitting killer buildings would never have taken precedence over Haiti's economic woes.'' (Bilham, 2010) They struggled for living and children ...