5 ways to improve global literacy
By Sophie Edwards
March 2018
OXFORD, United Kingdom — Literacy experts and advocates gathered in Oxford this week to discuss the latest thinking around how to promote global literacy.
Despite recent improvements, it remains a major challenge but is massively underfunded and subject to a number of misconceptions, experts said.
The Sustainable Development Goals call for “all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, to achieve literacy and numeracy” by 2030. While youth literacy rates have jumped in the past 50 years, progress is not fast enough, experts warned.
Approximately 750 million people over the age of 15 still lack basic reading and writing skills. Two-thirds of these are women, according to the United Nations, with female literacy improving by just 1 percent since 2000. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia have the lowest literacy rates, and the poorest and most marginalized are least likely to be able to read and do basic sums.
HRH Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands gave an opening address at this year’s World Literacy Summit which kicked off on Monday, calling on literacy to be framed as a “win-win” for everyone, and not simply as an education goal.
“We need to be framing literacy not as an educational issue but [as something] of importance to the ministry of finance because by helping literacy you help crime, poverty, health issues, employment issues,” she told Devex.
Here are five key takeaways for development from the two-day conference.
1. Remember adult learning
Historically, donor funding for literacy has focused on young school children and has tended to miss adolescent or adult literacy, according to Katy Newell-Jones of the British Association for Literacy in Development, or BALID. In the past, literacy programs assumed a “trickle up feeling that if we can educate the next generation of children then literacy problems will be solved,” she said, but this has been “proved to be so wrong.”
Instead, a holistic approach to literacy is needed, Newell-Jones told Devex, which supports adults, especially women, to become literate and which also emphasizes the role of learning within the family, including intergenerational learning and creating a “learning environment in the home.” The theme of adult learning was picked up throughout the conference’s sessions.
2. Teach in the mother tongue
In many developing countries, lessons are taught in English or another nonlocal language, such as French, from a young age.
In Pakistan, for example, this is has resulted in children learning to read English but with very little comprehension, according to Nadia Naviwala, an adviser to the Citizens Foundation in Pakistan.
“Kids in Pakistan do learn to read English; they just have no comprehension of it,” she said. “Is literacy impeded because it’s being done in a language that’s not their own?”
Teachers are also often not proficient in the language they are instructing in, according to Ian Cheffy from BALID.
Instead, children and adults should be learning to read and write in their local languages, he said.
“Parents may be demanding English, but let’s not ignore local languages,” Cheffy said, pointing out that in sub-Saharan Africa more than 1,700 languages are still regularly spoken by 750 million people, and of those 1,100 languages are also being written down. “Let’s not marginalize these supposedly marginal languages,” he said.
Nal’ibali Trust, a charity that aims to promote a culture of reading in South Africa, has made….