The level of education UNESCO is talking about is not enormously challenging: "Minimum reading proficiency for the end of lower-secondary education means students can connect main ideas across different text types, understand the author’s intentions, and draw conclusions based on the text."
So yes, I think that is a reasonable objective for 12-15 year olds that should be available to everyone by virtue of proper education alone.
Indeed it is very difficult to give a 12-15 year old a proper education if they cannot do this. It's foundational. So one would almost expect any 12-15 year old who can be taught _anything abstract_ at an appropriate level to be able to do this.
The alarming thing about the data shown here is that it includes children who are not even in education, which would skew it down a lot in, say, "third world" countries, but should not be skewing it so much in western countries, and yet... slightly more than one in five of UK and US 12-15 year olds lack this skill according to that assessment.
Some of this might be fundamental reading challenges (visual impairment, dyslexia, attention and memory), but still, it is not a particularly good sign for the global figure if these rather ordinary western countries are scoring so low. (Singapore and Japan manage more like 85%)
The full explorable graph appears to be here for 2023 data -- I can't find it for 2024.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-children-reachin...