David Macfarlane
Forty-five percent of South African adults are illiterate, but the government displays appallingly inadequate commitment to combating this. And the Department of Finance this week admitted to being unable to explain why such meagre resources are apportioned to the problem.
This emerged at a national conference convened this week in Midrand by the NGO Project Literacy and the European Union.
“Dismal and embarrassing” amounts of public money are spent on fighting illiteracy, and on adult basic education and training (Abet) more generally, said Elias Masilela, acting chief director of macroeconomic policy in the Department of Finance, in his keynote address to Abet on Trial.
“I could not establish [in preparing my address] why this is so,” Masilela said. “Is it deliberate policy? Why are there such low allocations?” he asked. Budgeted education expenditure of R47,8-billion in 1999/2000 compares well to other countries with similar economies, he argued. But he questioned why the government is not committing more resources to “non-formal education” (the item in the national budget that includes Abet, further education for adults, and other non-formal education like sewing and carpentry).
The state spends a paltry 0,8% of the education budget on non-formal education, and most of that is spent on young people who have failed matric and are taking a shot at the qualification for a second time, a University of Natal survey revealed earlier this year. So how the state intends to improve the plight of the 32% of adults with less than a grade seven education, and the 16% of adults with no schooling at all, remains an unanswered question.
The government’s willingness and ability to put its money where its mouth is came starkly into focus at the Abet on Trial conference. A recurring theme was that the shocking statistics on adult under-education and illiteracy, and on woefully inadequate funding to address these, are not new; yet frequent government rhetorical commitments to addressing these problems repeatedly fail to translate into material commitments.
In another address, the University of Natal’s Professor John Aitchison noted that Minister of Education Kader Asmal had called last year for a massive literacy campaign that, Aitchison said, is “still stalled”. He said the new campaign is still awaiting input from the Department of Finance.
Underlining this problem was a minimal Ministry and Department of Education presence at the conference, official engagement with which was largely restricted to a welcoming address by Khetsi Lehoko, Deputy Director General of Education. One of the conference’s resolutions at its conclusion on Wednesday was to lodge a formal complaint to the director general of education about this lack of official presence.
Literacy levels vitally affect a wide range of national priorities, as Project Literacy CEO Andrew Miller has repeatedly pointed out. HIV/Aids awareness, small business development, environmental education, tourism training, parent/child relationships, primary health care interventions, land resettlement programmes, work-place productivity levels, human rights and democracy education “all flourish and grow better when literacy levels are high”, he said in his International Literacy Day address in September.
Because NGOs have the literacy training expertise the government signally lacks, partnerships between the government and NGOs are imperative but partnerships in which significant finance is committed, Miller argued in his address to the conference.
The post-1994 drying-up of foreign donor funding to NGOs has gone damagingly hand-in-hand with corporate indifference to adult education, Miller said. South African Breweries’ beer division no longer contributes to Project Literacy, and Clicks donates a princely R500 a year. Responding to the usual corporate requirement that NGOs should now meet standard business criteria such as self-sustainability and cost-effectiveness, Miller observed, “I have yet to understand how when you work with poor people you become self-sustainable.”
“Why are we still having to complain about lack of funding, given the large numbers of illiterates in South Africa?” asked the Department of Water Affairs’s Mariam Sekati, who chaired the session at which Masimela, Aitchison and Miller spoke.