By Koli Banik, Education Specialist
International Literacy Day was held last Thursday, September 8th and the event was marked by a special celebration sponsored by the Global Partnership for Education (formerly known as EFA-FTI), Brookings Institution, and USAID.
Dr. Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator opened the event with a welcoming speech highlighting the educational achievements in Honduras, Liberia, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, as well as offering some grim statistics:
Today, over 60% of all school children around the world—nearly 200 million girls and boys—are learning so little that they are struggling to read basic words. In some countries, the situation is much worse. In Mali, 80 percent of schoolchildren couldn’t read a single word at the end of second grade. By the end of sixth grade, after spending half their lives in school, nearly half of them still couldn’t read a single word.
Emphasizing the importance of quality versus quantity when looking at education:
“Packing children into classrooms without helping them learn is not an education… it’s daycare.
Without a motivated teacher, without quality learning materials, without clear targets and effective monitoring, children will have little hope of gaining the promise of walking through those school doors.”
Dr. Shah concluded his remarks by presented Congresswoman Nita Lowey with the first ever 2011 Literacy Champion Award.
Congresswoman Nita Lowey’s remarks highlighted the power and importance of education to children, especially girls, in developing countries as well as to the United States. Her remarks opened by focusing on how investments in basic education lead to substantial and significant social and economic benefits to developing countries, stating: “…access to quality education brings the promise of a better life” and “No country has reached sustained economic growth without achieving near universal primary education.”
Congresswoman Lowey also commented on how investing in basic education has significant national security implications as well:
“Now is the time to invest in what works, and we know that promoting basic education is among the wisest investments we can make for our security, economy, and standing around the world. Scaling back these programs means scaling back our own national security and economic prosperity.”
The Congresswoman voiced her support for the Global Partnership for Education by calling for 2011 to be “the first year that the United States contributes to the Education for All Fast-Track Initiative.” She went on to say:
"This multilateral effort to address the challenges of achieving universal education will leverage each U.S. dollar with contributions from other donor countries, as well as – and this is critical – contributions from each partner country, and will augment the United States’ bilateral efforts across the globe."
In the "Governments taking action" session Ministry officials from Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua spoke about what their governments are doing to improve learning outcomes and ways for scaling up their initial initiatives. In particular, the State Minister from Ethiopia said his Ministry is leading a nationwide program to transform the ways in which literacy is addressed in grades 1-4. The government of Ethiopia plans to revise its entire language curriculum in order to make it a reading curriculum. This program is supported by USAID and is a seen as a successful program to scale up. The Liberian Ministry official spoke about the key contributors to ensuring reading is a success. He emphasized a major focus on READING, having resources to improve teacher skills and ensuring that there is an effective partnership with the Ministry of Education. All four countries have both FTI and USAID programs, which are at different steps in the spectrum that goes from measurement and awareness, all the way to action, and all the way to improving outcomes.
The “Innovative Approaches to Advance Literacy” was a series of "Ted Talk" style presentations by selected NGOs highlighting their innovative approaches to advancing literacy in developing countries. Of particular interest was the Literacy Bridge’s "Talking Book." The Talking Book is specifically designed for people who cannot read and who live without electricity. Rural teachers can use this device to complement their lessons. There was also discussion about cutting edge library projects such as the ones led by Room to Read and the Lubuto Library project.
During the "Thought Leadership for Strategies on Reading" session, representatives from Brookings, the Global Partnership for Education secretariat, and USAID briefly discussed their education strategies for how they are responding to improving learning outcomes. USAID released their new education strategy early this year and speaker, Patrick Collins, reiterated one of their signature goals for improved reading skills for 100 million primary school children by 2015. Kevin Watkins, Brookings Institution, was cautious and said that while various international and national reading assessments exist, there is a strong need for internationally comparable indicators to measure learning achievement from early childhood through post-primary and set school-based targets, including targets for greater equity. Luis Crouch, the Global Partnership for Education, made a bold statement about how the approach to education is changing to focus more on quality, not quantity, "This is a revolution and I will use the rest of my career to ensure countries scale up their practices to have all children reading."
Professor Steven Kless, the session moderator, closed the session by stating:
"I do realize and agree with how important literacy is but I am concerned, and this may be a little heretical, especially on International Literacy day, that we may be overemphasizing reading. I have heard colleagues whose focus is mathematics echo this sentiment. And I want us to consider much more than mathematics. Schooling has many purposes and literacy and numeracy, while important, are only part of the picture. I could and list literally dozens of educational outcomes that are very important to schooling. To name a few, they include critical and higher order thinking, conflict resolution skills, democratic attitudes, teamwork, resilience, compassion, conscientization, love of learning, etc."
During the “Practitioners Taking Action” session representatives from Save the Children, the Education Development Center, RTI International, and FHI-360 spoke about their own rigorously-evaluated interventions and the challenges confronting those interventions. For example, Save the Children spoke about their Literacy Boost program which has shown impressive results. Although they found that they need more than one school year to develop independent readers and supporting reading outside of school promotes equity.
Global Partnership for Education head Robert Prouty presented the day’s closing remarks, emphasizing the answers to advancing literacy are not necessarily “some-day” or “some-how” and how some field tested and proven approaches to advancing literacy produce serious gains. Committing the world to get all kids reading, as entry point, seems to be having the effect we always thought it could, namely galvanize coalitions and common action. The strengthened relationships among key actors around the common goal to make learning outcomes a key focus of advocacy and action is now at the forefront of agencies like EFA FTI Partnership and USAID.