Washington File

14 February 2003

United Nations Launches Literacy Decade

(First Lady Laura Bush says education must be a reality for all)
(1290)
By Judy Aita
Washington File United Nations Correspondent

New York -- Gathering in the historic New York Public Library with its
100 miles of books, First Lady Laura Bush, U.N. officials, and
President Natsag Bagabandi of Mongolia February 13 launched the United
Nations Literacy Decade.

The U.N. General Assembly declared 2003 to 2012 the Literacy Decade to
address the needs of 860 million adults and 113 million children who
are illiterate and give impetus to efforts to reduce the persistently
high rate of illiteracy worldwide. The U.N. Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the U.N. agency coordinating
activities for the decade.

A former public school teacher and librarian, Mrs. Bush will be the
honorary ambassador for the decade. As First Lady, Mrs. Bush has
established the "ready to read, ready to learn" initiative to raise
public awareness in the United States of key reading and teaching
principles and has hosted two National Book Festivals.

"All people deserve the opportunity to learn to read and write," Mrs.
Bush said. "Today education for all must not be an ideal -- it must be
a reality. Advancing education is fundamental to the development of
nations and of generations."

"Through this Decade of Literacy, governments will commit to bring
universal and gender-equal education and greater literacy to the
world. These are not simply goals for the next decade, these are moral
responsibilities every nation must embrace," she said.

"Throughout America's history, education has been the major instrument
for progress. We must bring this progress to every nation," Mrs. Bush
said.

She pointed out that the U.S. will be spending $333 million for
international primary, secondary and college education this year, with
$100 million for education in Africa. The U.S. will also fund skills
and information technology training and partnerships between
universities and students in the U.S. and students overseas.

Literacy is freedom to learn independently and continuously throughout
one's life and the freedom to transform oneself, the first lady said.

"For people through the world literacy is also power -- the power to
reshape their communities and their own destiny. It is the power to
improve socially and financially," Mrs. Bush said. "... literacy is
also opportunity -- opportunity to make a better life for themselves
and their family."

President Bagabandi of Mongolia initiated the effort for the literacy
decade and Mongolia sponsored the assembly resolution setting out the
decade and its theme of "Literacy as Freedom."

"Illiteracy eradication is an essential basic condition to providing
correct answers on every issue pertaining to world security, ensuring
human rights and sustainable development, promoting dialogue and
mutual understanding between civilizations," Bagabandi said.

"Illiteracy serves as a triggering source for underdevelopment,
poverty, inequality, and violence. Therefore the fight against
illiteracy shall not be limited to one group of countries, rather it
must be intensively carried out at regional and worldwide levels," the
president said.

Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, the largest
public library system in the United States, said that "the decade is
at once visionary and urgently needed both in this city and around the
world."

"Literacy as freedom. No phrase could better capture the relationship
between the acts of reading and writing on the one hand and the
individual and collective liberties on the other," LeClerc said.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the literacy decade is "a call
to focus our collective will on the enormity of the task ahead. It is
a recognition that we must go beyond the efforts of the past and apply
lessons learned from past mistakes.

"It is also a reminder that literacy is a human right," he said.
"Fifty-five years ago the Declaration of Human Rights established that
everyone has a right to education," he said. "The fact that 20 percent
of the world's population is deprived of it should fill all of us with
shame."

According to UNESCO, some 861 million people, or 20 per cent of the
world's adults, cannot read or write or participate fully in the
activities of their societies. Two thirds are women. Another 113
million children are not in school and therefore not learning to read.
While the figures are high, they are a considerable improvement on
world literacy rates in the 1950s when the first survey was taken
which found 44 percent of the adult population illiterate.

Africa, South and West Asia, and the Arab States account for 70
percent of the world's illiterate adults. An estimated 186 million
people, or about 14 percent of the population, are illiterate in the
countries of East Asia and the Pacific. In Latin America and the
Caribbean, some 39 million people, or 11 percent of the population, is
considered illiterate.

But illiteracy is not just a problem in the developing world. The
International Adult Literacy Survey in the mid 1990s found that at
least 25 percent of adults in 12 industrialized countries (Australia,
Belgium, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States)
failed to reach the minimum level of literacy proficiency needed to
cope with everyday life and work.

The U.N. has set the goal of halving adult illiteracy by 2015. But
UNESCO estimates that if progress is not accelerated, 800 million
people will still be illiterate by the end of the decade.

U.S. Secretary of Education Roderick Paige said that "we want every
child in our schools to succeed and a great body of our research tells
us where we should start. We should start by teaching every child
early in life the single skill upon which all other learning depends
-- and that is reading."

"This is so important to us that we are re-teaching teachers to teach
reading better," Paige said. "It is so important to us that we are
educating parents to help children at home learn to read better and we
are targeting historical levels of resources specifically to
accomplish this goal."

"A child who can read is a child who can learn and a child who can
learn is a child who can succeed and become an active contributing
participant in society who then can pass those traits down to their
children," he said.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said that the Literacy
Decade is not a separate initiative but part of worldwide development
and human rights efforts. Priority, he said, will be given to the most
disadvantaged groups, especially women and girls, ethnic minorities,
migrants, and refugees.

One of UNESCO's showcase projects for the decade is the recently
launched project which will tackle illiteracy in Afghanistan. UNESCO
estimates that only 51.9 percent of Afghan men and 21.9 percent of
Afghan women over the age of 15 can read and write.

The Afghanistan project will focus on building a nationwide network of
teachers, training people to develop and produce teaching materials,
and providing printing facilities. Community learning centers will be
established throughout Afghanistan to provide access to literacy
programs for as many people as possible and a literacy resource center
for girls and women will be opened in Kabul.

Mrs. Bush said that school systems around the world decimated by AIDS
must also be rebuilt.

"More than 10 million children under 15 have been orphaned by AIDS,"
the first lady said. "Many have lost not only parents and loved ones,
but their teachers as well. Education is critical for these children."

"Preventive education will teach them the facts about AIDS. They will
learn the skills they need to support themselves and their families,"
she said.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International
Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site:
http://usinfo.state.gov)