The Human Development Index (HDI) was introduced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1990. The advent of the HDI does not mean eliminating the role of GDP but improving measures of human growth that include GDP. Human development, as defined by UNDP, is the process of expanding people’s choices. Among the many options, there are three that are considered the most important.A long and healthy life, education, and access to resources consistent with a standard of living.
Education Development Index (EDI)
UNESCO usesfour among the six of the EFA targets selected based on data availability for measuring the Education Development Index (EDI), which is a combined index. As part of the goals, Universal Primary Education (UPE), adult literacy, educationquality, and gender equity will be addressed.
- Universal Primary Education (UPE) – The indicator chosen as a way of measuring the progress for achieving the goal, the Adjusted Net Enrolment Ratio (ANER) for primary schools is used as a means of measuring progress.Basically, this ratio measures how many students have been enrolled in primary schools and how many have been enrolled in secondary schools.This variable has a wide range of values between 0 and 100%. A 100% ANER therefore indicates that all qualified students have gotadmitted in school for the current year.
- Adult Literacy – The goal proposes to increase the adult literacy rate by 50% by 2015. Even though there is some disagreement regarding the accuracy of the in-hand data of literacy rates, adult literacy rates over the age of 15 are used as a guide in order to assess progress.
- Education Quality – Viability until grade 5 has been chosen as the best alternative for assessing EDI quality factors. This is because availability of data of many countries for comparison.
- Gender Equity – The fourth component of the EDI is the question of Gender EFA Index (GEI), a simple, equally weighted average of all three measures of Gender Parity Indexes (GPIs) in the primary and secondary educationsectors as well asin adult literacy. It therefore includes two subgoals withinthe original goal of the EFA.The goal of gender parity (ensure thatboth the genderhave equal access to primary as well as secondary education), equality among genders (Ensuring equality of both the genders in education) represented by GPI on Adult Literacy. (UNESCO, 2014).
