The United Nations literacy decade in Asia and the Pacific Progress ...

financial requirements needed to achieve EFA targets. These
calculations should be based on what is needed to operate
programmes of good quality. Therefore, debate and discussion on
the benchmarks for adult literacy are also in order.
Coordination
Data
Collection
ICT
Although the state takes primary responsibility for adult education,
the actual response to adult learning needs involves the participation
of a number of stakeholders – government agencies, NGOs, teachers,
employers, unions, communities, schools and other institutions, not
to mention adult learners, themselves. In
addition, adult learning occurs in a variety
of contexts not directly concerned with
imparting literacy skills, but which require
their constant application – for example,
programmes in community health, early
childhood education, environmental
education and job skills training. This
mutual involvement calls for effective
mechanisms for coordinating the efforts of
the different stakeholders. Better
coordination results in better service
delivery, data sharing and planning, and
avoids a wasteful duplication of effort. This
coordination is crucial for efforts targeting
educationally marginal groups, where
strategies need to be implemented in concert for optimum gain.
In addition, the international players on the literacy stage – UN
agencies and others – need to work together and pool their resources
to enable the UNLD to fulfill its mandate.
A severe constraint on policy and planning related to adult literacy is
the lack of reliable data. Statistics on adult literacy do not take into
account quality or impact indicators. In addition, the data are not
always disaggregated by gender, nor do they differentiate among
categories of people with different access to education (indigenous
people, ethnic minorities, rural or displaced communities, etc.). Data
collection methods often fail to recognize local needs or to build
local capacities for research, monitoring, data gathering and analysis
that benefit local community initiatives.
Therefore, adult education specialists should develop and validate
alternative evaluation techniques and indices based on small samples
that result in data which is of high quality. The aim should be to
enable frequent updating of valid and reliable data in order to reduce
dependence on large-scale sample surveys or censuses, which are
undertaken by governments, themselves, and subject to bias. NGOs
and community service organizations should be encouraged to take
on the duties of data collection and analysis in cooperation with other
stakeholders.
This technology has a great potential to open up the world’s treasure
of information and knowledge for everyone. However, this potential
is stymied by widespread commercialization and by uneven access
to the most basic communication infrastructure, since more than
80% of the world’s population is without telephones. (As for the
Internet, according to the Digital Divide Network, in 2004 are 6% of
the world’s population, or some 429 million people, were actively
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UN Literacy Decade in Asia and the Pacific