UNESCO UIS Education Statistics MCP

UNESCO UIS Education Statistics MCP Server

🇧🇷 Leia em Português

A public, hosted, provenance-first MCP server for the statistics of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) — education, science and R&D, culture and communication — no installation, no account, no API key. Point your MCP client at the hosted endpoint and ask about enrolment, completion, out-of-school children, literacy, education spending, researchers and R&D expenditure by country, region and year. It runs on Cloudflare Workers over Streamable HTTP and talks to the official UIS Data API.

Independent project. This is an unofficial, community-built client of the UIS's public

Data API — not affiliated with or endorsed by UNESCO or the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Data remain © UNESCO-UIS under CC BY-SA 4.0; see Data license and attribution.

Every response carries a provenance block (source URL, the UIS data release it came from, real retrieval timestamp, license, UIS citation) — exact figures with an audit trail, not numbers guessed from training data.

🇧🇷 Em português. Servidor MCP remoto e hospedado (nada para instalar, sem conta e sem

chave) para as estatísticas do Instituto de Estatística da UNESCO — matrícula, conclusão,

crianças fora da escola, alfabetização, gasto em educação e P&D por país, região e ano, direto

no Claude, no ChatGPT ou em qualquer cliente MCP, com proveniência e citação da fonte em cada

resposta: README em português.

Questions it answers

In plain language, inside the MCP client — the assistant picks the tool and the filters:

• "Which UNESCO indicators track out-of-school children?" (uis_search_indicators)
• "How did primary completion evolve in Brazil, Peru and Colombia after 2015?" (uis_get_data)
• "Is there a UNESCO series on government expenditure on education as a share of GDP?" (uis_search_indicators → uis_get_data)
• "How many researchers per million inhabitants do the BRICS countries have since 2010?" (uis_search_indicators → uis_get_data)
• "What is the adult literacy rate in Argentina and Chile, by sex?" (uis_get_data)
• "Which geo unit code does the UIS use for Côte d'Ivoire, and which regional aggregates exist?" (uis_list_geo_units)

Three of them — enrolment, literacy and education spending — run against the live server, with the tool calls and what came back: uis.sidneybissoli.com/examples.

Ask in your words, not UNESCO's. The UIS is worded in British statistical English, and the catalogue is matched on the indicator name — so the everyday or US word used to return *nothing at all*. Measured over the 5,063 indicators of the official catalogue (2026-09-16), and fixed since 0.3.0: the search expands the term to the source's wording (OR within a term, AND across terms — it only adds recall) and says it translated, in vocabulary_notes; a zero result comes with a hint on what to try next. The same table feeds the search index (Deep Research).

Only measured pairs go in (the asked word absent from the catalogue, the source's word present) — the table lives in src/uis/vocabulary.ts, with the counts. A term the UIS does not publish is left out and still returns zero, because an alias for data that does not exist promises what the source does not have: dropout, tuition, unemployment and labor (labour statistics belong to the sister server ilo-mcp-server; what labor matches today are 62 names containing "collaboration").

Comparison with the alternatives

Anyone who already works with UIS data has good tools, and this server replaces none of them — it sits somewhere else in the chain: it answers the question at the point where the question is asked, inside the assistant, with source, data release and licence attached to the answer. Versions measured on 2026-10-02.

About SDMX: the UIS no longer serves it. Its legacy SDMX API reached end-of-life on 2020-06-23 (stated in the UIS's own February 2026 data release note) and the endpoint now answers 404 — generic SDMX clients that still list a UNESCO source (e.g. sdmx1) point at that dead URL, and the DBnomics copy of UNESCO data is a frozen 2020-era snapshot. For SDMX over labour statistics, see the sister server ilo-mcp-server, which talks to the ILOSTAT SDMX API.

Do not use this server when you need a whole dataset rather than an answer (the bulk files are the right tool), when the question is not education, science, culture or communication statistics published by the UIS (labour → ILO, national accounts → IMF/World Bank), or when you need microdata: the UIS publishes aggregates, and so does this server.

Sister servers, same design and same provenance block, for other official sources: ILOSTAT (ILO labour statistics), IBGE (Brazilian statistics), BCB (Central Bank of Brazil), Senado (Brazilian Senate open data), SIH/SUS (Brazilian hospital admissions) and medical terminologies (ICD-11, ICD-10, LOINC, RxNorm, ATC, MeSH).

Use it (hosted — no setup)

Point any MCP client at the Streamable HTTP endpoint:

https://uis.sidneybissoli.com/mcp

Claude Desktop / Claude Code and other clients with native remote support:

{

"mcpServers": { "unesco-uis": { "url": "https://uis.sidneybissoli.com/mcp" } } }

For clients that launch MCP servers as a command, use the mcp-remote bridge:

{

"mcpServers": { "unesco-uis": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://uis.sidneybissoli.com/mcp"] } } }

The uis-mcp-server.sidneybissoli.workers.dev hostname is also served, as a secondary.

ChatGPT (Deep Research)

ChatGPT deep research (and company knowledge, and research workflows over the Responses API) only uses an MCP server that exposes exactly search and fetch — this server does, on top of the uis_* tools. Point the connector at the hosted endpoint, no key required:

https://uis.sidneybissoli.com/mcp

search ranks the query against the full UIS catalogue (~5,060 indicators — education, science/R&D, culture, demographic context) and returns { id, title, url } (ind: , e.g. ind:ROFST.1.CP); fetch returns the indicator as readable Markdown — name, theme, Data Browser group and framework, available years, a data sample (Brazil and the SDG world aggregate, last five years; one Data API call with a pinned release) and how to query it with uis_get_data — with the public UIS Data Browser page as url (https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/view#indicatorPaths= %3A0%3A ), which is what ChatGPT cites. In search/fetch the text channel is the Deep Research contract's JSON (no footer); provenance travels in `structu