Countries With the Lowest Primary Completion

Every country with a figure for primary completion, ranked from lowest to highest. The top three are South Sudan (7.94%), Somalia, Fed. Rep. (28.8%) and Liberia (29.8%). The middle country of the 165 has 97.4%.

What this measures

Primary completion rate, modelled estimate, in % of children. Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics. For this measure, higher is better.

The share of children who finish primary school. UNESCO estimates it from household surveys and uses a statistical model to fill in across years. It is not the World Bank's primary completion rate, which is a ratio built from school enrolment counts of children entering the last grade. This one asks whether the child actually finished.

This measure mostly follows how rich a country is, so this ranking is close to a ranking by national income. Each country’s page also ranks it against countries with similar incomes, which is often the fairer comparison.

The full ranking

Each country’s latest figure, from 2025–2025. The year beside each value says when it was measured.

More on primary completion

• Countries With the Highest Primary Completion
• Primary completion by country: trend over time and what it goes with

Related rankings

• Countries With the Lowest PISA Maths
• Countries With the Lowest PISA Reading
• Countries With the Lowest PISA Science
• Countries With the Lowest Expected Schooling
• Countries With the Lowest Mean Years of Schooling
• Countries With the Lowest Education Spending
• Countries With the Lowest Primary Enrollment
• Countries With the Lowest Secondary Enrollment

A ranking describes countries, not the people in them, and a high or low place does not by itself say why. All country rankings.