This is a story about Mixquic, a small township situated on the southeastern edge of Mexico City, but it is also an account of a group of women who live there. These women rarely go very far from their homes, and when they do, it is to travel to neighboring pueblos, to visit a government office, or to purchase goods for their household. Downtown Mexico city is about three hours away by public transportation and a trip there takes almost all day.

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The world continues to be marked by great scientific discoveries and technological strides that are fundamentally changing the physical, social, economic, political and even culture milieu of human beings. Unfortunately, however, certain important segments of the world population are neither able to participate in these transformations nor to appropriate them truly as their own. Such population groups appear disconnected from all of these developments. Africa- for it is Africa that interests us here- remains a continent that needs to engage in a veritable inner struggle for its own...

Demonstrating the normality of multilingualism and questioning those teaching systems grounded in monolingualism are the objectives of this study. The data comes from 30 African, Asian and Latin American countries. The study underlines the advantages of multilingual learning: preservation of identity, cultural richness and plurality.

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In many developing countries, literacy has been seen as the key to 'women's development' resulting in a proliferation of women's literacy programmes run by both Governments and Non-Governmental Organisations. Nepal is one such example of a country where literacy programmes have been used extensively as an entry point for involving women in development activities. My own experience of working in this field in Nepal has made me question what impact these literacy programmes have on women's lives: in particular, I have wondered whether there is a strong link between...

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...

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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