Fresh impetus for literacy in Africa

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A conference on literacy in Africa will be held in Bamako (Mali), from 10 to 12 September. This meeting is the third in a series of six regional and sub-regional conferences organised by UNESCO to promote global literacy. It will review the situation on the continent where, on average, less than 60 percent of adults can read or write, one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.

The conference, called "Renewing Literacy to Face African and International Challenges", will be inaugurated by the President of Mali, S.E. Amadou Toumani Touré, and UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura in the presence of several African first ladies.

Over two and a half days, the participants - First Ladies, education ministers, finance ministers, decision-makers, representatives of civil society and universities, education professionals and members of bilateral and multilateral organisations - will attempt to identify best policies and new initiatives and consider the issue of the costs and financing of programmes. Other themes to be discussed will be mother-child literacy, literacy for health or to generate income, the use of national languages and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ITC).

The meeting will also be an opportunity to present programmes that have proved successful and show how the challenge of literacy can be tackled using a variety approaches. One of the aims of the conference is to establish cooperation between the different parties to help African countries improve their literacy rates.

The first two meetings in this series took place in Doha (Qatar) in March and in Beijing (China) in July and August this year. Between now and the end of 2008, three other conferences will be held in India, Costa Rica and Azerbaijan.

These initiatives follow the Global Literacy Conference organized by the White House in New York on 18 September 2006, under the auspices of Mrs. Laura Bush, First Lady of the United States and Honorary Ambassador for the United Nations Literacy Decade. That conference marked the start of a vast international campaign to promote literacy within the framework of the United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012) and UNESCO’s Literacy Initiative for Empowerment, or LIFE (2006-2015).
The conference on literacy will be followed by a regional Forum on Education for All (EFA), Dakar +7, which will take place from 13 to 14 September in Bamako. Organized by the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa (BREDA), this forum will assess progress towards the provision of Education for All seven years after the World Education Forum in Dakar (Senegal) in 2000, and define courses of action to further accelerate the process.

• Author(s):Media advisory l’UNESCO N°2007-54
• Source:UNESCOPRESS
• 04-09-2007