Costa Rica has long promoted itself as the most literate country in Central America, and by the numbers it is. Government statistics put the literacy rate among people 15 and older at roughly 98 percent, a figure repeated in tourism brochures, investment pitches and international rankings for decades. But a closer look at how that number is produced, and who it leaves out, suggests the real picture of who can and cannot read and write in this country is considerably worse than official statistics admit.
The core problem is that Costa Rica’s literacy figure comes from self reported survey answers, not from any actual reading test. When a census worker or household survey interviewer asks someone whether they can read and write, the person answers for themselves, and there is no verification.
Illiteracy carries deep social stigma, particularly among older adults and in rural communities, so people frequently say yes even when they can do little more than sign their name. This pattern of self reported literacy running well ahead of tested literacy has been documented across Latin America and the developing world for years, and there is no reason to think Costa Rica is an exception.
For some unknown reason, Costa Rica has also never participated in the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, known as PIAAC, the only rigorous international test that measures actual functional reading and math skills among working age adults. Chile is currently the only Latin American country that has taken part.
Without that data, nobody, not INEC, not the Ministry of Education, actually knows how many adults in Costa Rica can functionally read a lease, a prescription label or a job application. The government’s own household survey data hints at how large that gap might be. The 2023
Encuesta Nacional de Hogares found that while more than 95 percent of children between 5 and 18 attend school, only 43 percent of adults 24 and older have completed secondary school or higher. Again, it is self reported information. Even that still leaves a majority of Costa Rican adults with, at most, a primary education, a population in which functional literacy gaps are common even among people who would most likely answer yes to a census worker’s verbal question.
Then there is the migrant population, which the national statistics were never designed to capture well. Costa Rica is home to an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 Nicaraguan born residents, many without legal documentation, along with smaller communities from Panama, Colombia and Venezuela.
Household surveys sample dwellings, and undocumented families are far less likely to be reached, or to fully disclose who lives in the home, which means this group is structurally underrepresented in the literacy statistics altogether. Nicaragua’s own illiteracy rate runs well above Costa Rica’s, so a large undercounted population from a higher illiteracy country almost certainly pulls the real number up.
Rural and indigenous territories carry a similar blind spot. Decades old census data already showed rural illiteracy running more than three times the urban rate, and there is little evidence that gap has closed. A national average near 2 percent can mask rates several times higher in specific rural cantons and indigenous territories, places that get folded into a countrywide figure dominated by San José’s educated, urban population.
There is also a personal dimension to this that statistics alone cannot capture. I have at least one member of my own family and one employee who cannot read or write, and I suspect there are others in my life who have simply never told me. What I have learned over the years is that people carry this quietly, and they only reveal it once they trust that you will not judge them.
That trust takes time to build, and most surveys, census takers and government forms never get anywhere near it. It is one of the reasons I have made a habit of leaving voice messages rather than sending text messages to certain people in Costa Rica. A written message assumes a level of comfort with reading that is not universal, and a voice note sidesteps that quietly, without ever making the moment about literacy at all.
I suspect this same dynamic explains why certain phone apps, video content and voice based advertising perform so much better here than text heavy websites or written promotions. A population with a meaningful hidden pocket of nonreaders is going to gravitate toward whatever does not require reading, and that shows up in behavior long before it shows up in any government survey.
Conservative estimates are that at least somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 people currently living in Costa Rica, citizens and migrants combined, cannot read and write at a functional level, several times the roughly 90,000 suggested by the official illiteracy rate.
Until Costa Rica actually tests adult literacy rather than asking people to self report it, the true scale of the problem will remain a matter of estimation rather than record.
