Alphabétisation durable, défi au non-développement: le cas de l’Afrique subsaharienne (Sustainable Literacy in the Face of Non-Development: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa)

In 1990, the international community gathered in Jomtien and committed to banishing illiteracy from the landscape as the 21st century approached. On the one hand, its demise would result from the introduction of universal primary education; on the other, its residual scope would be reduced as literacy measures were introduced across the board.

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Although UNESCO has, since its foundation in 1945, been denouncing illiteracy worldwide, and although its efforts were already preceded by the Revolution of October 1917 that initiated the battle to curb it with the organization of a huge literacy campaign in its wake, such campaigns were, for many years, considered to be an end in themselves, integral to the right to education for all human beings, whose founding principle was more formally enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sacrificing considerable resources on the altar of humanity’s cultural emancipation was...

This book, which was the runner-up for the 1992 International Literacy Research Award of UNESCO, presents a remarkable study carried out in the Nigerian State of Oyo, focusing on a programme combining adult literacy education with indigenous educational methods. Trational African education, as described in this work, is characterized by a holistic approach in which the individual learns through a continuous interaction with the community and with his or her environment. The use of this approach the literacy education has led to a significantly higher success rate than was the case with...

Many ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Babylonians and the Greeks, had different legends as to how they first learnt to read and write. These legends vary in the way that they narrate the origins of reading and writing; however, the majority describe the ability to read and write as a precious gift from the gods. Such legends testify to the immense value that these ancient civilizations placed on reading and writing. In more recent times, the ability to read and write constituted the means by which a person could access humankind’s cumulative knowledge and...

Since the 1990 Jomtien Conference on Education for ALL (EFA) up to the Beijing World Conference of Women in 1995, education of women has been thrust in the center of government and NGO’s pronouncements, as they acknowledged the importance of providing women equal access to school and other educational opportunities. In Beijing, the discussion has led to a deeper reflection of the interconnections of women’s education and empowerment as well as the complex relationships between democratizing opportunities and the content of the provisions.

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The declaration of International Literacy Year (ILY) in 1990 has revived interest in literacy work. Most of its premised on the urgent need for the Third World to achieve total literacy by the year 2000. The World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) held in Jomtien the same year furthermore put women in the center of the policy discourse as demonstrated in the World Declaration on Education for All which stated that “the most urgent priority is to ensure access, to and improve the quality of, education for girls and women’’.

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There are millions of people in prisons and other correctional institutions throughout the world. Most of them have no higher vocational or other advanced education, and even in countries with a universal right of access to 10 or more years of schooling, a large minority – commonly between 25 and 40 per cent – face difficulties in reading, writing and numeracy and in conducting social transactions. The right to basic education in prisons has been shown to be a prerequisite for achieving the internationally agreed goal of ensuring a basic level of education for all.

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As women's education has become one of the key development objectives in the nineties, it is crucial to examine the assumptions under which policies, programmes and projects are formulated towards this goal. More recently, the concept of empowerment has been tied to the range of activities undertaken by and for women in different areas, education included. In all these, a related question is: From what and whose perspective are we going to evaluate such assumptions and its empowering outcomes?

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International Literacy Year, 1990, was one of those (sadly increasingly rare) occasions on which we were able to mark that intrepid achievement – access to the written word – of many millions of men and women in the course of the century now coming to a close. Literacy has been integral to my professional duties. Working for an international organization, UNESCO, I have been actively involved in this field – as an actor; as a ‘demonstrator’ addressing real-life issues on the ground; as a witness or observer; even as an organizer of meetings, symposia and congresses such as the one...

A network of international women projects, exchange of know-how, evaluation of project ideas with the aim of examining the international transfer possibilities and finally, putting it all into effect : these key phrases explain the framework of the international workshop ‘’Train the Trainers’’ in Hamburg. The reports of the partcipants and the results of the workshop will be presented here.

Download: Education in informatics for women by women: international workshop ( PDF 5,52 MB)