According to ProLiteracy International,

Literacty is the ability to read, write, compute, and use technology at a level that enables an individual to reach his or her full potential as a parent, employee, and community member.

• There are 774 million  adults around the world who are illiterate in their native language.
• Two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women.
• In the U.S., 30 million people over age 16 - 14 percent of the country's adult population - don't read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level or fill out a job application.
• The United States ranks fifth in adult literacy skills when compared to other industrialized nations.

Adult low literacy can be connected to almost every socio-economic issue in the United States:

• More than 60 percent of all state and federal corrections inmates can barely read and write.
• Low health literacy costs between $106 billion and $238 billion each year in the U.S. - 7 to 17 percent of all annual personal health care spending.
• Low literacy costs the U.S. $225 billion or more each year in non-productivity in the workforce, crime, and loss of tax revenue due to unemployment.

According to a new report issued by the National Center for Education Statistics, seven million adults or about three percent of the adult population cannot complete the most basic literacy tasks. They do not read well enough to participate completely in Bible study or worship. They likely are not fully employed; their health is at risk, too.

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS).