According to UNESCO, some 796 million adults are illiterate, of whom, two thirds are women. That’s around 17% of the world’s adult population.  In many of the world’s poorest countries around half the citizens are illiterate, exposing children and adults to one of the most powerful forms of disadvantage – what Amartya Sen described as a focal feature of capability deprivation.   Literacy inequalities are one of the quiet scandals of our time.

 

Photo: An adult literacy class in Ethiopia (copyright, Clinton Robinson)

So what’s going on? Why is it that nation-states and the international community continue to fail in this duty to fellow and distant citizens? As a universal human right, literacy illustrates the limitations of ‘rights’ without the support of binding laws or constitutional commitments to citizens. Where constitutional rights do apply they are not always converted into activity on the ground. This is illustrated through the cynicism though which governments and development institutions claim to support the universal right of literacy as an idea, but demonstrably fail to turn the idea into meaningful entitlements.  In a recent study by Action Aid, they showed that few countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America spend more than a couple of percent of their education budget on literacy.  For most the figure is under 1%.   That’s less than one third of the minimum benchmark promoted by Action Aid and the Global Campaign for Education.

International development policy is unfortunately of little help and needs to change. Commitment to achieving the second Millennium Development goal of universal primary education has been accompanied by a decline in spending on adult literacy programmes (with some notable exceptions in Latin America).  The commitment to lifelong learning enshrined in the six ‘Education for All’ goals has for many governments and donors been converted to policy of EFA as ‘except for adults’.  Goal 4 of the EFA Dakar Framework for action was to achieve ‘a 50 percent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults’. 

An illustration of the neglect of adult literacy is the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, which since 2002 has directed donor funds to developing countries (and which despite much criticism for its neglect of adult literacy) states on its web-site (‘10 things about EFA FTI’) that it ‘wants all children around the world to receive a quality education’.   The trouble with this reductionist logic is that it does not work.   Over the last decade it has become abundantly clear from empirical sources such as the annual EFA Global Monitoring Report (GMR), that for the world’s poor, a policy of promoting universal primary schooling while neglecting educational entitlements of adults is actually a policy of exclusion that robs the poorest and most disadvantaged people beyond their childhood of what should be their educational entitlement to literacy.  It also wastes human capital because young people and adults are not helped to convert their initial literacy learning into sustained functional literacy abilities.
 


Image: Poster from the UNESCO 2011 celebration of International Literacy Day.

Is there any positive news?  I think there is.  The UN literacy decade (2003-2012) continues to promote literacy globally, and to support the countries with the highest non-literate populations through its ‘Literacy Initiative for Empowerment’ (LIFE), and through efforts to improve the quality of international adult literacy assessment. There is also the recent ‘BELEM Framework for Action’ on adult education, adopted by 144 Member States of UNESCO, which re-states the need for an urgent change of direction to ‘enable all young people and adults’ to have a right to education.  Within that framework they affirm ‘that literacy is the most significant foundation upon which to build comprehensive, inclusive and integrated lifelong and life-wide learning for all young people and adults’.  Of course, those rights need to be converted into real entitlements and political accountability. With that in mind, perhaps the most encouraging thought as we ‘celebrate’ international literacy day is the drawing to an end of the Millennium Development goals up to 2015, and the scope for a new policy agenda.

Bryan Maddox is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia. 

Sources and links

Action Aid (2010) The Financing Literacy Project: Key findings and reflections on the Adult Literacy Benchmark 12.

UNESCO. (2008) The Global Literacy Challenge http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001631/163170e.pdf

UNESCO (2010) Belém Framework for Action. Report of the 6th International Conference on Adult Education. Belém, Brazil, December 2009.

UNESCO (2011) The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education. The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2011.