Paris, February 3 (RHC) -- Cuba is the country in Latin America and the Caribbean with the highest ranking in the Education Development Index (EDI), says a report released by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, (UNESCO.

UNESCO´s annual education report, named "Education for All: Global Monitoring Report," looked at the state of learning among the youth -- children between the ages of 15 and 24 -- in some 37 countries.

In the report, Cuba boasts an EDI of 0.983, even higher than that of the United States.  The study places Cuba among the nations with the most progress in achieving the UN development goals in the fields of education, noting that the Caribbean island is the country with most of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) devoted to education, with a total of 13 percent.

The UNESCO report also warned that more children across the world's poorer countries are illiterate than previously believed, saying poor access to education and poorly trained teachers lay at the root of the trend.

Roughly 250 million children in the world's poorest nations could not read part or all of a sentence, the study said. Most of the children came from Arab states, Sub-Saharan Africa or South and West Asia.

"Access is not the only crisis; poor quality is holding back learning even for those who make it to school," UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova wrote in the forward to the report.