Data are key to telling us how well we are doing in progressing towards Education for All – whether countries are on track or off track, and who is getting left behind in entering school or learning once inside the classroom. Policymakers need to be presented with such information in easily accessible ways to make sure they know whether they are fulfilling their commitments. This is why the Education for All Global Monitoring Report team is seeking your help to communicate these data to policymakers.

Every year, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report collates statistics from multiple sources and displays them as tables, graphs and charts. For the past two reports, we have also made infographics out of some of the key findings. A growing online tool for visualizing complicated data, infographics are hugely useful to reports such as ours which are grappling with communicating the complexity and importance of the evidence we bring together for making policy recommendations on issues such as reaching marginalized children, making sure education reaches those living in conflict-affected countries, or making sure young people have the right skills they need for work.

We are seeking your help to visualize our data and message, and are delighted to announce that we have formed a partnership with the Guardian Datablog and Visual.ly, one of the biggest infographic communities in the world, to launch an infographic competition on the subject of Youth and Skills: Putting education to work. Winners will have their infographic posted on the Guardian DataBlog and will become certified designers on Visual.ly’s Marketplace.

This competition is part of our youth-led campaign, ‘Let’s put education to work’, comprised of an online petition, blogs, polls, competitions and even a photo and film contest run by another of our partners, TakingITGlobal.

In addition, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve launched the first ever global SMS campaign for young people who might not have computers to add their voices too: participants just text their name, age, country and what job they would do if they had the skills to +447580 484 263.

Competitors should work from one our downloadable datasets to create their infographics or take your own data from our new website: The Worldwide Inequality Database on Education.

You don’t have to be an expert to design a graphic – there are many free online infographic tools to work from. So try your hand and send your submissions through to  contest@visual.ly or efareport@unesco.org (with #youthskillswork in the subject line).

The deadline for submissions is January 7th 2013.

Chat with us on twitter using @EfaReport and #YouthSkillsWork. And, remember, don’t forget to reference the EFA Global Monitoring Report!