SEPTEMBER 8: INTERNATIONAL LITERACY DAY

Paris, September 7 (N°2001-95) - There are now almost four billion people on the planet who can read and write. As we prepare to celebrate the first International Literacy Day of the third millennium, this fact highlights the significant progress made in past decades. But, as the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, stresses in a message for September 8: “The scale and complexity of the task of achieving literacy for all are certainly daunting.”

The progress is undeniable. In 1950, 50% or more of the adult population aged 15 years and over was illiterate in half the world’s countries. Today, only 25 countries fall in that category and most countries have pushed illiteracy to below 10% of the adult population. Around four adults in five are literate, compared with three in four adults in 1990 and fewer than two in three adults in 1970. At this rate, five adults in six will be literate around 2010. Among the most remarkable successes is India, where the level of literacy has risen 13% between 1991 and 2001, and Bangladesh, where 65% of the adult population now is literate - 30% more than in 1990.

But illiteracy remains a large-scale phenomenon. For a long time, the number of illiterate people even steadily increased because demographic growth outstripped the access to education. Up to the end of the 1980s, the world’s illiterate population swelled to total nearly 900 million people aged 15 years and over. Even though the figure started to decline in the 1990s, there were still 875 million illiterate adults in 2000. Unless major efforts are made, this figure is forecast to fall only slightly, to around 830 million by 2010.

In addition, despite reducing some inequalities observed over the past few decades, women continue to make up the bulk of illiterate adults. Alongside this rising feminization of illiteracy, there is also a geographic concentration: of the 25 countries where estimated adult illiteracy rates remain higher than 50%, 17 of them are located in Sub-Saharan Africa and five are in South Asia.

In his International Literacy Day message, UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura lauds the “spectacular progress” towards global literacy but also notes the fact that “literacy continues to be unevenly distributed within and between societies. As a result, the rewards of literacy are unavailable to hundreds of millions of people whose increasing poverty, exclusion and marginalization render the learning society not merely a distant dream but perhaps an unimaginable one.”

Koïchiro Matsuura says: “This situation is all the more intolerable because the technology, expertise, experience and resources to build a literate world are available today. The scale and complexity of the task of achieving literacy for all are certainly daunting. There is too much at stake, however, to allow ourselves to become dispirited.”

The Director-General notes that the United Nations General Assembly will soon be considering formal approval of a United Nations Literacy Decade, of which UNESCO is expected to be named lead agency. This initiative, he says, “will provide a framework for generating a new vision of literacy that embraces not only the learning needs of adults but also those of children and youth.” He stresses that within this vision “there is a clear recognition that the solutions for different educational problems are inter-connected. In particular, the growth of adult literacy, especially of women and female youth, is essential for universalizing access to primary education and improving its quality and relevance.”

The Director-General adds that, as well as celebrating literacy “as a value in itself that is closely linked to basic human dignity and full citizenship of one’s country and the world,” it must also be considered a vital means for securing other benefits and achieving other goals. “Touching every aspect of our lives and also the lives of those around us, literacy is truly transformative.”

While recognising the quiet but persistent fight against illiteracy by hundreds of thousands of people, professionals and volunteers, Koïchiro Matsuura calls on everybody, political leaders and ordinary citizens, “to give increased and sustained support to the drive for literacy for all. Through increased literacy, all of our lives are enriched.”

 

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The full text of the Director-General’s message is available on the site: www.unesco.org/bpi/eng/dg/
Statistics on literacy can be found on the site: www.unesco.org/education/information/wer/WEBtables/Ind2web.xls