About the education and work indicators

We provide education and work related indicators for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and subnational regions within these countries.

The indicators in this database are:

  • Mean years of education of adults (women/men/total) in various age groups
  • Educational attendance of children (girls/boys/total) in various age groups
  • Expected years of schooling children (girls/boys/total) age 6
  • Percentage of women in paid employment
  • Percentage of adults (women/men) in specific employment categories

Years of education is generally available in DHS surveys and some other surveys. In MICS surveys and some other surveys, both a level and a variable indicating the highest grade completed within this level are available. For these surveys, years of education is computed by combining these variables. In a substantial number of surveys only the highest completed educational level is available. This variable is recoded into years of education as follows: None=0, primary=6, lower/junior secondary=9, upper/senior secondary=12, tertiary=16.

Occupation categories distinguished are farm, lower nonfarm and upper nonfarm. Lower nonfarm are manual, sales and service jobs. Upper nonfarm are professional, managerial, technical and clerical jobs.

Construction of indicators

The indicators in this database are created by aggregation from household surveys, i.e. taking the average of the values of a characteristic of individuals or households in an area.

The sub-national areas that are used for aggregation are based on the geographic information that is present in the survey datasets. The available regional coding is often, but not always, based on official administrative subdivisions used in the countries.

In cases where regional subdivisions have changed over time, the subdivisions used in earlier and/or later surveys are adjusted to keep comparability.

For relatively small datasets a reduction in regions may be done to increase the number of cases on the basis of which aggregation takes place.

For some countries for which regional divisions differ too much between years to make data comparable, different divisions are used for different years.

Data sources

We combine survey data for over 500 recent (1990+) household surveys and other sources for 130+ developing countries and almost 1,500 subnational regions from the following sources:

  • Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS)
  • UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)
  • Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) International
  • Barometer Surveys: Afrobarometer, AmericasBarometer, Arab Barometer, Asia Barometer
  • Other data sources: Chinese Household Income Project, Chinese Household Finance Survey, Indian Human Development Survey, PAPFAM survey

More information

Detailed information on the construction of indicators through aggregation can be found in: