Education - Literacy - Girls & Women


	Literacy

Literacy is:

• A right still denied to nearly a fifth of the world’s adult population.

• Essential to achieving each of the EFA - Education for All - goals.

• A societal and an individual phenomenon, with attention needed to both dimensions.

• Crucial for economic, social and political participation and development, especially in today’s knowledge societies.

• Key to enhancing human capabilities, with wideranging benefits including critical thinking, improved health and family planning, HIV/AIDS prevention, children’s education, poverty reduction and active citizenship.

The literacy challenge has absolute and relative dimensions, particularly affects the poor, women and marginalized groups, and is much greater than conventional measures indicate:

• In absolute numbers, those without literacy skills are mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, South and West Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. Prospects for meeting the 2015 goal hinge largely on progress in the 12 countries where 75% of those without literacy skills live.

• In relative terms, the regions with the lowest literacy rates are sub-Saharan Africa, South and West Asia, and the Arab States, all with literacy rates around only 60%, despite increases of more than 10 percentage points since 1990.

• Illiteracy is associated to a significant extent with extreme poverty.

• Women are less literate than men: worldwide, only 88 adult women are considered literate for every 100 adult men, with much lower numbers in low income countries such as Bangladesh (62 per 100 men) and Pakistan (57 per 100 men).

• 132 of the 771 million people without literacy skills are aged 15 to 24, despite an increase in this group’s literacy rate to 85%, from 75% in 1970.

• Direct testing of literacy suggests that the global challenge is much greater than the conventional numbers, based on indirect assessments, would indicate, and that it affects both developed and developing countries.

The literacy challenge can be met only if:

• Political leaders at the highest level commit themselves to action.

• Countries adopt explicit literacy policies to:

Expand quality primary and lower-secondary education;
Scale up youth and adult literacy programmes;
Develop rich literate environments.

Scaling up literacy programmes for youth and adults requires:

• Active government responsibility for adult literacy policy and financing as part of education sector planning.

• Clear frameworks to coordinate public, private and civil society provision of literacy programmes.

• Increased budgetary and aid allocations. Literacy programmes receive a mere 1% of the education budget in many countries. An additional US$2.5 billion a year to 2015 will likely be needed to make significant progress towards the Dakar literacy goal.

• Basing programmes on an understanding of learners’ demands, especially their language preferences and their motivations for attending class, in consultation with local communities.

• Curricula that build on these demands, with clearly stated learning objectives and the provision of adequate learning materials.

• Adequate pay, professional status and training opportunities for literacy educators.

• Appropriate language policies, as most countries facing stark literacy challenges are linguistically diverse. The use of mother tongues is pedagogically sound but must offer a smooth transition to learning opportunities in regional and official languages.

Developing literate environments and literate societies requires sustained attention to:

• Language policies.
• Book publishing policies.
• Media policies.
• Access to information.
• Policies to get books and reading materials into schools and homes.

Acquiring, improving and using literacy skills happens at all levels of education, and in multiple formal and non-formal contexts. Achieving each of the EFA goals depends strongly on policies that foster literate societies and set high standards for literacy, the foundation for further learning.