My life is tilling the soil. I don’t need to read. The Bible? They tell us about that at Mass. The news? I listen to the radio. The newspaper costs the price of a kilo of salt for my kids,” says Godfroid Bimenyimana, a 57-year-old Rwandan farmer.
Bimenyimana and millions like him have no desire to read and write because they do not see the direct benefits. They think it will not change their lives.
So why force literacy on people? As one literacy expert put it, ‘reading and writing are the second culmination of our humanity”, after speech. By failing to provide literacy, we deprive people of being fully human.
For Claudia Harvey of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), ‘it’s a moral issue. Can we justify excluding 877-million from participating in the modern world just because they are rural and difficult to reach?”
Literacy is important, says Adama Ouane of the Unesco Institute for Education, ‘because it’s the key to the toolbox that contains empowerment, a better livelihood, smaller and healthier families, and participation in democratic life.”
A measure of its importance, says Ouane, is the fact that two of the six goals of the Dakar Framework for Action – the international pledge made in 2000 to provide education for all by 2015 – mention adult literacy. But since literacy is the ‘key of keys”, it permeates all six goals.
The gains for women in particular are immense. For example, a study in Bangladesh showed that women with secondary education were three times more likely to attend a political meeting than women with no education.
What is literacy? Literacy is more than the ability to read, write and do arithmetic. It comprises other skills needed for an individual’s full autonomy and capacity to function effectively in a given society. It can range from reading instructions for fertilizers, or medical prescriptions, knowing which bus to catch, keeping accounts for a small business or operating a computer.
Given the centrality of literacy to modern survival, the international figures on illiteracy are astounding. In 2000 there were an estimated 877-million illiterate adults, with 113-million children not attending school. More than two-thirds (68%) of these illiterates can be found in East and South Asia. Worst hit are females, who account for up to two-thirds of all illiterate adults. In some regions, ethnic or linguistic minorities lose out, in others those who live in remote areas.
Illiteracy rates in the Arab region and sub-Saharan Africa are respectively 38% and 37%. In developed nations functional illiteracy is also widespread. One adult literacy study of 20 industrialised countries found that at least one-in-four adults fell below the level needed for coping with demands of life in a complex society.
Many countries have made genuine efforts to provide literacy to their populations: among them are Botswana, Colombia, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia and the United Republic of Tanzania. But a certain degree of controversy prevails as to the effectiveness of some of these campaigns.
‘Nothing is sustainable if it isn’t sustained,” says Bhola.
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