literacy for life; EFA global monitoring report, 2006 - Institut de ...

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232 / CHAPTER 9
2
Education for All Global Monitoring Report
In Ecuador,
70,000 teachers
were trained
for a national
literacy
campaign
campaign was planned and organized within eight
months and conducted in four to five months in
1988/89 (Torres, 2005). Around 70,000 literacy
teachers were trained, partly face-to-face (aided
by videos demonstrating teaching methodology)
and partly by distance training. Over 25,000
literacy circles were established in homes and
workplaces. Of some 300,000 learners, 200,000
completed the courses, 85% of whom wrote the
final test with satisfactory results. The campaign
provided important lessons regarding
mobilization, pedagogy and the engagement of
young students in literacy work (Box 9.11).
After Namibian independence in 1990, the
Ministry of Education developed policy guidelines
and literacy primers and manuals, and recruited
fifty district literacy organizers who were trained
for three months and then posted across the
country to recruit, contract and train literacy
educators (called promoters). The programme
was well planned and financed, although the
promoters lacked adequate ongoing support
(Lind, 1996). Eritrea’s Enhanced Adult Literacy
Programme (2002–2006) is charged with
developing basic literacy and numeracy skills for
450,000 adults in their mother tongue. Special
efforts are made to assure the participation of
those disabilities, women, the internally displaced,
refugees returning from the Sudan and
demobilized members of the Eritrean Defence
Forces. The Adult Education Division of the
Ministry of Education plans, manages, monitors
and evaluates the programme in partnership with
Box 9.11 Selected lessons from
Ecuador’s literacy campaign
Mass literacy campaigns with the enthusiastic participation
of broad sectors of the population are possible in societies with
democratically elected or popular governments.
Acceptable learning results in reading and writing can be
achieved if enough emphasis is given to pedagogical issues
rather than ideological ones and if quality is made at least as
important as quantity.
Young students can be turned into effective literacy
facilitators and enthusiastic organizers, given enough guidance,
pedagogical training and instillation of self-confidence.
Public opinion and participation can be won by
demonstration of good practices.
Source: Torres (2005).
other ministries, United Nations agencies, local
and international NGOs, and public and private
partners. Learning is supported by educational
broadcasting and small rural libraries or reading
rooms. Day care is provided for children of
women learners (Ghebrezghi, 2003).
These examples concern large national
programmes. But many literacy activities are
small and often relatively isolated, run by NGOs,
religious bodies and other CSOs. While they are
likely to have more intensive contact with
learners, they face challenges similar to those
of larger programmes: finding stable funding,
training and motivating staff, obtaining
appropriate materials and, above all, eliciting
community support.
A still greater challenge is the scaling up of
local good practice. Maintaining staff quality and
training capacity, sustaining access to learning
materials and managing greater distances
between coordinators and learner groups present
significant problems, as the experience of Reflect
programmes demonstrates. In Ghana, keeping
Reflect’s approach to training and supervision
was found to be unaffordable for an expanded
programme. The incentives built into the pilot,
such as transport and meal allowances, required
strong political backing for widespread
replication, and high teacher turnover was a
severe constraint on large-scale programming
(Riddell, 2001).
The extent to which different programmes
and activities are coordinated and integrated
within a comprehensive national policy varies
considerably. Fragmentation, even competition,
operates against the creation of genuine
partnerships in which literacy becomes the
universal concern. Thus, how to share resources,
and divide roles and responsibilities among
stakeholders, is a major consideration in the
planning and designing of literacy policies and
strategies.
A recent evaluation of literacy programmes
supported by the World Bank concluded that
intensive government training and supervision
of NGOs was important: ‘though many NGOs
can carry out quality literacy programmes,
others need considerable support and monitoring’
(Abadzi, 2003a). Some commentators see a
danger of community-based organizations
becoming dependent on government funds
and having to adopt practices at odds with
their programme philosophy (Duke and Hinzen,
2005).