David Macfarlane
One in two South African adults cannot read or write, but the government continues to allocate dismally low resources to this national scourge and to adult education generally.
Basic education for adults is being increasingly sidelined in government priorities, a major conference last week in Johannesburg repeatedly heard. One of the country’s largest NGOs, Project Literacy, convened The Role of Adult Education in Sustainable Development together with the national Department of Education and USAid. One aim of the conference was to influence the government to direct more resources towards eradicating illiteracy and promoting adult education.
“Illiteracy both results from and creates poverty,” said Professor Nelly Stromquist, a specialist in international development education based at the University of Southern California. “Successful literacy programmes must be part of a national development programme. We know this, but fail to act,” she said, observing that this is a failure of governments worldwide.
South Africa spends a miniscule 0,8% of its education budget on non-formal education the item in the national budget that includes adult basic education and training, further education for adults, and other non-formal training such as sewing and carpentry. The anomalous result is that those with most of the expertise in areas such as literacy training namely NGOs still struggle to survive and are forced to go cap in hand to fund programmes that experts say are crucial to the growth and health of the economy.
This grim financial picture seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Increased expenditure on education is not the solution to poverty and unemployment, Jannie Rossouw, deputy general manager of the South African Reserve Bank, told the conference. Although “literacy is … the key to economic empowerment … more spending on education will not improve the human skills of the population”, Rossouw insisted, recommending instead “the better utilisation of existing expenditure on education”.
The plight of poor women received particular attention at the conference. “Poverty is … borne disproportionately by males and females,” argued Pinkie Lalthapersad-Pillay of Vista University’s economics department.
“In poor households women undertake more work than men, are less educated than men and have less access to income-earning activities.”
Unequal gender relations of power “systematically deny rural women access to land and tenancy rights,” Lalthapersad-Pillay said, as well as to “rural credit, farming inputs and other commodities that are vital to socio-economic well-being”.
A further problem concerns the role of NGOs, the conference heard. Despite their expertise, NGOs tend “to be excluded from policy-making in adult education and are usually reduced to being mere executors [of government policy]”, Stromquist said. The “gap between political and civil society institutions must be bridged” and NGOs must be allowed greater participation in the socio-political processes, she argued.
The conference highlighted appalling discrepancies in access to global resources. “Over the past three decades the gulf between developed and developing countries in terms of income, consumption and other basic social indicators has become sweeping,” said Lalthapersad-Pillay. “In developing countries about 30-million children die every year from causes that are not critical in developed countries. Furthermore, about 110-million children receive no primary education.”
“We must reduce the gap between the overfed and over-educated north and the developing world,” said Project Literacy CEO Andrew Miller. Echoing this concern, human rights activist Sheena Duncan, who delivered the keynote opening address, said: “Eighty percent of the world’s wealth is held by 20% of the world’s population. They [the 20%] must be forced to share and literacy can help people win their rights.”
The conference interrogated fraught social issues that literacy levels affect: HIV/Aids awareness, small business development, environmental education, primary health care, land resettlement programmes, workplace productivity, skills development, human rights and democracy education, among others.
It also presented specific case studies of adult education and development initiatives elsewhere in Africa: technology transfer via adult literacy in Uganda, a computer literacy project in Nigeria, and literacy and poverty alleviation in Mozambique. “We didn’t want the developed world talking at us, nor more academic theorising,” Miller said.
But government commitment to doing rather than talking remains in doubt. “South Africa has an amazing Constitution and Bill of Rights,” Duncan said, “but what do they mean if people don’t know these rights? Illiteracy prevents people from accessing their rights.”