18% – or almost one in five – of the world’s 650 million children of primary school age are not in school. Clearly, there are some widely different regional patterns behind this global average. Almost half of the children in West and Central Africa are out of school, and more than one-third in Eastern and Southern Africa. In South Asia, this proportion exceeds one-quarter. On the contrary, not more than 6% of children are out of school in East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, in addition to industrialised countries.