Jury meets to find prize-winners for International Literacy Day 2016
© UNESCO - Learning literacy through gardening classes in Slovakia
An international jury has met to choose five projects for this year’s UNESCO International Literacy Prizes.
The winners of the two annual awards, which recognize excellence and innovation in the field of literacy, will be revealed on International Literacy Day, September 8, 2016 which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Despite huge advances, literacy data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) indicates there are still 757 million adults of 15 years and older worldwide who cannot read or write a simple sentence and roughly two-thirds of them are female.
The five-person jury, composed of distinguished experts appointed by UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova, spent three days sifting through nominations to find projects which best illustrate this year’s theme of Innovation in Literacy and fit the long-term objectives of the Global Education Agenda. The Director-General will make the final decision.
Juror Dr Raafat Radwan who is a senior consultant to the Arab Labor Organization for Human Development, and a winner of one of the awards in 2010 for his innovative project “Females for Families: 3F” said political commitment was key to ensuring literacy for all but remained a major challenge.
Buy-in from governments needed
“Some political systems still rely on managing and controlling the population and that is easier when they are not able to read and write. So there may be talk of education but without real change. Add corruption to this and it becomes a recipe for disaster. What is needed is buy in at the top of government,” he said.
He said he had been looking for projects which not only demonstrated results but which could be effectively scaled-up.
Speaking of the situation in her home country Colombia, literacy specialist Maria Aurora Carrillo Gullo said poverty which drives inequality was the major obstacle for literacy.
“How can you think about education when you don’t have fresh water or electricity? People who are not literate are not only losing their opportunities to advance in life but also to enjoy the richness of written culture.”
Ms Gullo, whose educational model “A Crecer” is used by the Colombian Education Ministry for vulnerable people in the Arauca region, also created “Transformemos Educando”, aimed at young people and adults in vulnerable communities.
In 2011, during her post as CEO and educational director of the Transformemos Foundation, the city of Cartagena substantially reduced illiteracy by incorporating 28,000 youth and adults into formal education through her system. For her work she became one of the UNESCO prize laureates in 2012.
Has this project bettered lives?
She said women suffered most from exclusion.
“They are the ones least likely to go to school and even when they are in the system they quickly hit the glass ceiling. So young women may feel they cannot be engineers. And women assume the greater part of looking after children,” she said.
But all studies showed that educated women bring about the most social change, earning and retraining for new job market.
Her criteria for selecting the five final nominations were effectiveness and real benefits.
“The question I kept in mind was ‘Has this project bettered the lives of people and will it enable them to keep learning?’ This is not about being able to sign your name. It is about the long-term.”
International Literacy Day was born at the World Congress of Ministers of Education on the Eradication of Illiteracy in Tehran in 1965.
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