Noting that literacy rate stands at 48.1% in the year ending March 1977, Shapour Mohammadzadeh also said, “According to the eighth round of the National Population and Housing Census, literacy rate stood at over 98% in Tehran, Mazandaran, Semnan and Yazd provinces in the year ending March 2017. There were 2.6 million illiterate people in the country that year, of whom 400,000 were foreign-born.”
“Literacy rate among Iranian women stood at 28% before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Now ninety percent of women can read and write" he was quoted by IRIB News as saying.
Literacy rate stood at 90% in the Middle East and North Africa in 2018, according to the World Bank, citing the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.