WUNRN
Giving
women a second chance at literacy will increase their earning power and give
their children a brighter future
In
By Fatimah Kelleher – September 8, 2014
Educating girls is now at the core of much development thinking and
programming, but illiteracy among women and older adolescent girls outside
formal education is an increasingly critical issue that risks falling between the
gaps. Of the 774 million adults (15 years and older) who still cannot read
or write, two–thirds of them (493 million) are women.
The significance of this within the wider development and women's rights
agenda in developing countries cannot be ignored. Literacy is a fundamental right
for women. In 2010, Irina Bokova, director-general of the UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), said
that "newly literate women have a positive ripple effect on all
development indicators". This broadens the issue significantly beyond
education alone.
"On its own, literacy neither saves lives nor fills hungry
mouths," says Katy Newell-Jones of Feed the Minds. "However, we encounter women's literacy time
and time again as a valuable component in women's empowerment. A woman who is
able to keep her own business records is more likely to be able to manage her
income and expenditure; and the children of a literate mother are more likely
to complete their education."
Literate women are also more able to mitigate some of the root causes of
maternal and child morbidity and mortality. Further, women's productivity in the informal sector in countries across
sub-Saharan Africa and south
A woman's ability is also increasingly dependent on the written word in a
technology driven world where smartphones are ubiquitous, and illiteracy limits
her to only basic levels of engagement.
So where and how wide is the gap? The 2013/14 Education For All Global Monitoring report highlights that
despite gains since 1998, more than 60% of adult women in Arab states, south
and west Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are still illiterate. A closer look at
national data shows cause for greater concern. In
Compounding such data is concern over underestimation of the problem.
Global statistics use national surveys and censuses that ask whether
respondents have been to school. But increased
access to education through higher enrolment rates can underplay high dropout
among children before they are literate. Even completion of basic education
is no guarantee, due to the ongoing struggle for quality within education among countries that
have accelerated their educational programming to meet the Education for All and millennium development goals over the past 15 years.
But for millions of girls on the
cusp of youth followed by rapid adulthood, addressing challenges within formal
systems will not be easy. Domestic responsibilities, new roles as wives and
mothers, coupled with increasing economic productivity, makes 'time poverty' an
even greater challenge to their learning options. Traditional views on women's
education along with issues of distance and security in reaching adult learning
centres underpin the challenges.
There is a clear need therefore to approach this problem in a holistic
manner, as outlined by a National Institute of Adult Continuing Education report on women's
right to literacy: "Literacy learning is particularly effective when it is
linked to, integrated with or embedded in other learning. Such approaches
produce stronger outcomes in both literacy and vocational education and
training. Women who want to be successful traders, efficient farmers,
contribute to school governance and rear healthy children must be equipped with
the necessary, associated literacy skills."
Critical to this "second chance" approach is ensuring women are
involved in the co-designing, development, implementation and evaluation of
their learning programmes and activities. Approaches such as Reflect that use participatory methodologies
are already popular since the 1990s and are now widely used to empower women.
Considerations such as learning mother-tongue and sensitivity to the power
relationships women have to broker in their adult contexts are critical. When
such learning is placed at the heart of the community, empowerment is also more
likely to emerge.
Greater investment in women's adult and youth literacy is urgently needed,
while responsibility must be accepted across all sectors, not just in
education. With skills training falling increasingly within economic and
private sector development initiatives, integrated women's rights programming
must go beyond nominal gender box ticking and instead
fully utilise social and women's rights expertise to address the complex
realities. Hundreds of millions of women are dependent on it.
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