Education is an essential tool for achieving a sustainable future. In the last decade, numerous statements from United Nations conferences or EU bodies, advocated repeatedly for education, sensitization and increasing awareness of the public on sustainable development. In expanding informatics, some of the major problems of Romania and Republic of Moldavia are, paradoxically, functional illiteracy and school drop. These phenomena represent socio-educational problems of contemporary society that, unresolved, in the medium and long term, can have serious effects on the future development of societies. On the PISA 2015 performance scale, the share of low-performing pupils in basic skills remains high, 39% for Romania (one of the largest in the European Union) and 42% for the Republic of Moldavia. And the dropout rate in the two countries continues to record high values (18.3% in Romania in 2017 and 19.1% in the Republic of Moldova in 2016). Therefore, a large share of future generations in the two countries are functionally and socially illiterate due to the lack of primary education, which will be a catastrophe for the labor market, business and the economy in the future. The paper presents a brief analysis of the characteristics and causes of functional illiteracy in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. They are analyzed, comparatively, the functional illiteracy rates of pupils from the two countries in PISA testing during 2006-2015. It also analyzes the characteristics of school dropout in the North-East Region of Romania and Republic of Moldova and the effects of these two phenomena on the future development of the cross-border area.