Press
Release No.2002-61
LITERACY: GOVERNMENTS MUST ASSUME THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES SAYS
UNESCO DIRECTOR-GENERAL
Paris, September 10
- The goal established at the World Education Forum (Dakar, Senegal,
2000) to halve adult illiteracy by 2015 will not be met unless
a massive effort is made in the coming years. Faced with this
reality, UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura today
appealed to governments around the world to assume their responsibilities
in the struggle towards a literate world, and to guarantee basic
education for all citizens.
"In this world
of nation-states […] literacy is a national responsibility
and governments are the main bearers of that responsibility,"
said Mr Matsuura. "Certainly, governments deserve every assistance
from their partners, but no government should abdicate its responsibilities."
Mr Matsuura was speaking
at the award ceremony for UNESCO's annual literacy prize winners:
the Adult Education Division of the Eritrean Ministry of Education,
the Literacy and Adult Basic Education Programme in Uganda, the
Bunyad Literacy Community Council in Pakistan, the Egypt-based
Regional Centre for Adult Education, and Judith Kalman (Mexico),
who receives this year's International award for Literacy Research
from the UNESCO Institute for Education (Hamburg, Germany). The
ceremony finalized two days of celebrations at UNESCO Headquarters
for International Literacy Day (September 8).
"Many of us take
literacy for granted as a 'given' in our lives, but for others
it can be reached only through special efforts," said Mr
Matsuura. "It is an outrage that something as fundamental
[…] becomes an unattainable luxury for millions of people
throughout their lives."
According to the latest
statistics from UNESCO, some 20.3 percent - or one in five - of
the world's adults are still illiterate. They show a clear downward
trend, but highlight that the process is excruciatingly slow.
At the current rate of progress, 15 percent of the world's adult
population will still be illiterate in 2015, which represents
a drop of 25 percent over today's figures.
The statistics would
indicate that governments are banking on their expanding school
systems, which swallow the lion's share of most education budgets,
to eventually overcome the problem of illiteracy. However, this
condemns hundreds of millions of adults to lifelong illiteracy,
which, says Mr Matsuura, is "alien to any conception of human
dignity and human rights."
Reminding governments
of the six goals set by 164 countries at the World Education Forum
to achieve education for all by 2015, and, in particular to halve
adult illiteracy by that date, the Director-General called on
"all relevant actors to play their full part in this endeavour."
Mr Matsuura also stressed
the importance of the United Nations Literacy Decade, which will
be launched next January and carry through to 2012, as a means
of galvanizing decision-makers everywhere into action to meet
the Dakar goals.
UNESCO, as lead agency
within the United Nations system, will coordinate the international
community's activities for the Decade. The Organization has prepared
an International Plan of Action aimed at stimulating and harmonizing
action by national governments, local communities, non-governmental
organizations, universities, public and private organizations
and civil society.
Serving as a "blueprint
for change", the Action Plan gives priority to policy development,
programmes, capacity building, research, community participation,
and monitoring and evaluation. It also stresses the need for special
and "urgent" attention for women (who make up two thirds
of the world's illiterates), ethnic and linguistic minorities,
indigenous populations, migrants, refugees, people with disabilities,
the elderly and pre-school children, especially those with little
or no access to early childhood care and education.
To complement the
Action Plan and support the initiatives of governments and all
those involved in literacy work, UNESCO has launched the NFEMIS
programme (Non Formal Education Managing Information Systems)
which is developing new systems of data gathering, monitoring
and evaluation to better measure the impact of literacy and education
activities to provide more reliable information on illiteracy.
NFEMIS will not rely
solely on government statistics. Rather it will use information
gathered at community level, via a growing network of Community
Learning Centres (CLCs), or Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs)
being established worldwide with support from UNESCO and its national
and international partners. Several hundred such centres have
already been established in Asia, and are being rapidly developed
in Africa and Central Europe.
The aim of these and
other UNESCO initiatives, such as the promotion of literacy research,
the preparation of literacy materials adaptable to diverse cultural
and social situations, the training of literacy teachers or provision
of equipment to develop distance education using new technologies,
is to provide governments and other partners - the civil society
organizations, public ands private sector institutions, private
individuals and other international agencies with as much support
as possible to devise the policies and programmes necessary to
achieve a literate world.
Emphasizing the theme
of this year's International Literacy Day - "Literacy as
Freedom" - Mr Matsuura stressed that "literacy is indeed
a vital, positive and active force in people's lives which enables
them to make choices, to participate and to exercise their rights;
in other words, to be free."
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For more information on UNESCO's literacy activities go to http://www.unesco.org/education/index.shtml
Contact
Sue Williams
Bureau of Public Information, Editorial Section
Tel: (+33) (0) 1 45 68 17 06;Email: s.williams@unesco.org
