This polygon shapefile represents basic literacy and education characteristics at the qism/markaz-level in Egypt, collected as part of Egypt’s 2017 Census by the Central Agency For Public Mobilization And Statistics (CAPMAS). Indicators in this layer include ability to read and write and level of education completed. This layer was derived from a geodatabase (see the related data file) and was documented and restructured by East View Cartographic, Inc. The lowest administrative level represented in the census data collection is the Shyakha/Qurya (ADM3/4) and includes 5890 polygons with 97 attribute variables. Attribute descriptions retain Arabic language names and unique identifier codes. All variable names were translated from the Arabic language. Field name prefixes, originally written with coded titles, were renamed to create unique names (e.g. Original variable of “جمله_السكان” was updated to D001 and given the alias “Total Population [جمله_السكان]”, the letter D was given as it relates to the Demographic theme table. D = Demographic, E = Economic, H = Housing, S = Social). All variables from the original data were reviewed for completeness and organized into their relevant themes of Demographic, Economic, Housing, Social. In the attribute table, all geographic names and codes are represented as text fields and census data are represented as doubles or long integers. Automated tools were run to apply aliases in the format “English translation field description[Arabic language field description]”. Vector data was analyzed for accuracy and compared with national boundaries. The local projection for the administrative boundaries is EPSG:32636, or WGS 84 / UTM zone 36N.