UN launches literacy decade

IFACCA/Artshub, 18 February 2003, USA

The United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012), with the theme ‘Literacy as Freedom’, was launched last week at the organisation’s headquarters in New York. The project aims to give new impetus to efforts worldwide to reduce persistently high rates of illiteracy. According to UNESCO statistics, some 861 million people, or 20% of the world’s adults, cannot read or write or participate fully in the organisation and activities of their societies. Two-thirds of these people are women. Another 113 million children are not in school, and therefore not gaining access to literacy. President of Mongolia, Natsagiin Bagabandi, who sponsored the UN resolution calling for the decade’s establishment, was a keynote speaker at the launch, along with Director-General of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, who will act as co-ordinator of the project. According to a statement from UNESCO following the launch, Matsuura said that the highest priority must be ‘reaching the poorest and most marginalised groups, whose lack of basic literacy skills is most severe.’ He continued: ‘The project of literacy is to liberate each person’s potential. We cannot stand idly by and watch this potential go to waste on such a huge scale.’ There is still much work to be done in order to achieve the goal set at the World Education Forum in Dakar (Senegal, 2000) to halve adult illiteracy by 2015. If progress is not accelerated, UNESCO estimates that 15% of the world’s adults – or 800 million people – will still be illiterate by that date. UNESCO cites statistics that 70% of the world's illiterate adults live in Sub-Saharan Africa, south and west Asia, and the Arab states and north Africa, while an estimated 186 million people, or about 14% of the population, remain illiterate in the countries of east Asia and the Pacific. In Latin America and the Caribbean, some 39 million people, or 11% of the population, is considered illiterate. Illiteracy, however, is not just a problem for the developing world, UNESCO reminds us. The International Adult Literacy Survey, which in the mid-1990s compared literacy skills in 12 industrialised countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States), found that at least 25% of adults failed to reach the minimum level of literacy proficiency considered necessary for coping with the demands of everyday life.

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