INTERNATIONAL LITERACY DAY: SEPTEMBER 8
Literacy
is a cause for celebration because humankind has achieved spectacular
progress in this respect. There are now close to four billion literate
people in the world. However, literacy for all – children, youth and
adults - is still an unaccomplished goal and an ever-moving target.
A combination of ambitious goals, insufficient and parallel efforts, inadequate resources and strategies, and continued underestimation of the magnitude and complexity of the task, is likely to account for this situation. Lessons learnt over recent decades show, in any case, that meeting the goal of universal literacy calls not only for more and more effective efforts but also for renewed political will and for doing things differently at all levels: locally, nationally and internationally.
861 million adults – nearly one seventh of the world’s population - cannot read or write. Most have never attended school or did so only for a brief period. Grinding poverty, but also the wars, famine and natural disasters that displace populations for years or more, are generally to blame, but not always.
Available evidence suggests that functional illiteracy – the inability to decipher labels or the ordinary instructions required to fill out a form or apply for a job – affects as many as one quarter of citizens in some of the world’s more affluent societies. More and better educational facilities and systems are required to help a huge number of our contemporaries out of the poverty trap to which illiteracy, among other factors, has confined them.
Making good on the promise of sound primary education for all children everywhere by 2015 – the goal solemnly proclaimed at the Dakar World Education Forum in 2000 by the representatives of the vast majority of world’s States – is obviously the place to start. But the progress recorded so far gives little cause for optimism. Of the 164 countries that committed themselves to achieving education for all by 2015, 70, it now appears, may fall short. Most of them are in sub Saharan Africa, but also included are Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan – four countries which together account for 61 percent of the world’s illiterate adults today.
The UN General Assembly proclaimed the ten-year period beginning 1 January 2003 the United Nations Literacy Decade. For more information see www.un.org/depts/dhl/literacy, www.portal.unesco.org