The Meaning of Literacy in El Salvador

Erik -most people knew him by that name- died in a car crash in October 1999. News of his death sent ripples across the Usulutan region of El Salvador, where Erik had been working as director of COMUS, or the United Communities of Usulutan.

For David Archer, in the region as Action Aid's head of international education, Erik was the personification of Central America. A guerrilla commander with the FMLN during the civil war in El Salvador, he took up non-violent combat following the peace accords as director of the grassroots organization COMUS. Turning military hierarchical structures on their head, Erik worked to build the organization from the base upwards. Driven by his vision of justice and equality, the process Erik initiated was, in the most fundamental sense, a literacy process. When Erik and David met, both men were disillusioned by their past experience of adult literacy work. Archer had developed an idea for a new approach to adult literacy. "Within a few minutes," says Archer, "Erik understood my proposal better than I did myself."

In Archer's view, although traditional literacy programmes usually espoused radical ideas, they mostly failed in practice. For the past 30 years, most such programmes have been based on textbooks or "primers", devised by experts in the capital city and sent out to rural areas. He proposed an alternative approach, which was at the time being piloted in Uganda and Bangladesh. Erik agreed to set up a third pilot project of Archer's scheme in El Salvador. Now known as REFLECT, the approach is used in various forms by over 250 organizations in 40 countries.

The first step involved tearing up the old primers, not just in Usulutan but across the country. The aim was to move the power base for literacy programmes from the "experts" in the capital to the real "experts" in the communities where the projects would take place. Instead of treating the campesinos as passive beneficiaries, they were to be active protagonists. Rather than begin from the patronizing standpoint of teaching people what they do not know, the project aimed to cultivate the complex knowledge base of the poor.

The seeds of the idea took root. Erik mobilized COMUS education promoters in Usulutan, and secured support from another national non-governmental organizations (NGOs). He appointed Abdon as one of the project's key coordinators, a local campesino who had never been to school himself and only learned to read at the age of 23.

In accordance with a programme developed between 1993 and 1995, each community developed its own learning materials. Known as literacy "circles", a group served as a democratic forum where people could join forces to compile a detailed survey of their local environment. For example, participants created a map of their village using sticks, stones, seeds and beans to illustrate different features -this idea was then expanded to produce maps detailing local history, the changing natural environment, land use and land tenancy. People were encouraged to draw up calendars recording seasonal workloads, income and expenditure, and the occurrence of various illnesses; diagrams explored power relationships locally and nationally. Having begun life as three dimensional models on the ground, these images were eventually transferred to paper for permanent, official records. In the end, each community had produced a comprehensive archive of the locality -in many cases the first of its kind.

The last time David visited Erik at COMUS in July 1999, he had developed an even deeper sense of the relationship between literacy, power and organization.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of NGOs in El Salvador, just as in many other parts of the world. Erik saw this as the effective privatization of poverty. While it is relatively easy to set up an NGO, often there is no direct accountability to the communities it aims to serve. Potentially, these organizations can raise substantial funds, but more often than not, the poor are excluded from the decision-making process which eventually allocates those funds.

He wanted to give people the means to seize the power of literacy, so that they can critically review all the plans and budgets that are drafted in their name by external NGOs and government agencies. So that they can write their own plans and budgets, and put forward their own studies and proposals. This is what Erik envisaged as the next step for REFLECT in Usulutan. For him, literacy was about placing people firmly in the centre rather than on the margins of society.