UNESCO leads the United Nations Literacy Decade (UNLD) under the slogan of “Literacy as Freedom”. Launched at UN Headquarters in 2003, the Decade aims to increase literacy levels and to empower all people everywhere. In declaring this Decade, the international community recognised that the promotion of literacy is in the interest of all, as part of efforts towards peace, respect and exchange in a globalizing world.

At the request of the UN General Assembly, UNESCO is coordinating the Decade and its international activities. UNESCO launched the Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) in 2005 as a framework for achieving the Decade’s goals.

• Why the Literacy Decade?
• International Plan of Action of the UNLD
• UNLD Coordination
• Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE)
• UNLD Mid-Decade Review

The Education for All goal of increasing literacy rates by 50% by 2015 provides the overall target for the Decade, and the Millennium Development Goals set the Decade in the context of poverty reduction.

In the beginning was the Word. The Word that was Creation. Its transformation into the written
word came to us when it was first scratched as a hieroglyph or ideogram on a stone or
traced on papyrus, and when it travelled from parchment to print in Gutenberg. That was
the next genesis: of literacy. It was and is the miraculous ability that humans alone possess
within the miracle of creation. (We have devised the means to take to the air.)

Our new millennium, stated as dedicated to defining and upholding human rights,
surely should list literacy as an inalienable one?

Yet UNESCO reports that nearly 800 million adults in our era cannot read or write and
more than a 100 million children do not go to school, deprived of their rightful heritage, literacy.
In South Africa, where I write these words, illiteracy is almost 50% in certain rural areas.

What are the reasons, world-wide or nearer wherever one’s home may be? Poverty
and lack of educational facilities are the obvious ones in poor and developing countries. The
disastrous economic effect is seen from the humble levels – at an automobile assembly
plant in South Africa, research found that many workers on the line could follow only spoken
orders, unable to read any written notification. At the level of higher education for the professions,
universities are faced with the problem of students ostensibly qualified for entry
who do not have the vocabulary or skilled use of the written word necessarily assumed for
university courses. The shortage of suitably competent candidates for positions essential in
development of governance, social services, industry and commerce, is thus evident.
President Mbeki recently said that in order to serve the needs of South Africa’s fast-growing
economy – the leading one on the African continent in terms of resources and infrastructure
– he believes we shall have to import qualified individuals from other countries to fill
the vacancies while assisting to raise the capabilities of South Africans to fulfill such positions,
particularly in industry. An upgraded version of the adage, each-one-teach-one.

But we come back to the absolute. It shouldn’t need to be stated, but has to be, it
seems. Literacy is the basis of all learning. Even if one goes on to the differently profound
numero-ideogrammatic knowledges of science.

And on the way back to the source that is the written word we arrive at a presently
prevalent intermediate condition of literacy: semi-literacy. This is no doubt exacerbated in
multilingual countries where as a result of long colonisation a foreign language became and remains a lingua franca, the second language, not the mother tongue, the natal Word of the
inhabitant. One would accept that you are unlikely to be able to read and write the lingua
franca as confidently, precisely, as, once master of the alphabet, you surely could read and
write your own. But a distinguished writer and academic, Professor Es’kia Mphahlele, tells
me that black South Africans emerge from their schooling semi-literate in the reading and
writing of their own mother tongues just as white South Africans and those of other ethnolinguistic
backgrounds are semi-literate in theirs. To be able to read the legend on a billboard
and the bubble-enclosed dialogue of Spacemen in a comic book, while unable to understand
the vocabulary of a poem or follow in prose literature the meaningful variations of syntax, the
use of words in ways that open up new depths of self-comprehension – that is not literacy.
It is not what every individual should have by human right.

The developing countries, although with more reasons for producing only the halfway
to literacy, are not alone in this cultural state. Colleges in the USA report the same result
of their educational system, reflection of current cultural values of their society. In Britain
there is the same dismay at young men and women, born and educated in the country of
the birth of the English language, who cannot read or write using the great resources of their
mother tongue.

So while poverty and lack of educational opportunity are responsible for the great
void in our world that is illiteracy, this tragic situation is not the prime cause, let alone the
justification for the widespread phenomenon of semi-literacy.

The fact is that we are conjoined, all countries long developed or struggling to develop
across the abyss between rich nations and poor, under threat of the Image against the
Written Word. From the first third of the 20th Century the image has been challenging the
power of the written word as the stimulation of the imagination, the opening of human
receptivity. The bedtime story of middleclass childhood has been replaced by the hour in
front of the TV screen; in shack settlements all over the poor countries of the globe the TV
aerial signifies the battery-run screen where no book is to be found. School and community
libraries don’t exist in villages and towns where video cassettes are for hire. Yes, TV images
are accompanied by the spoken word, sometimes by text, but it is the picture that decides
how secondary the Word’s role shall be.

The American writer William Gass defines best the Written Word, in its home, the
book: ‘We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons
have… if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together… Words on a screen have virtual qualities, to be sure…
but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be
gone. Off the screen they do not exist as words. They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they
only wait to be remade, relit.’

Yes, the Image of text, of the Word, disappears off the screen; to recall it, along with
the other visuals, you have to have an apparatus, a cell, a battery, access to an electric power
connection. The book needs none of these. Simply held in the hand it can be read, turned
to again and again, on a bus, in the subway, in the bath, on a mountain top, in a queue.

This is no fuddy-duddy turning away from progress. The vast advances in communications
technology are an information revolution that has great possibilities for social development
if well used, which means made economically available to the millions in the world
whose lives will otherwise be bulldozed by the financial oligarchy of globalisation.

But information does not, it cannot, ever replace, outmode illumination – searching
knowledge of the human intellect and spirit that, all readers know, comes in communication
with the Word in its infinitely portable, available home between hard or paperback covers.

First it became the book of the movie.
Now it is the book of the website.
Don’t let it happen.

By Nadine Gordimer

She squats, bare feet
splayed out, not
graceful; skirt tucked around ankles.

Her face is lined and cracked.
She looks old,
older than anything.

She’s probably thirty.
Her hands also are lined and cracked
and awkward. Her hair concealed.

She prints with a stick, laboriously
in the wet grey dirt,
frowning with anxiety.

Great big letters.
There. It’s finished.
Her first word so far.

She never thought she could do this,
Not her.
This was for others,

She looks up, smiles
as if apologizing,
but she’s not. Not this time. She did it right.

What does the mud say?
Her name. We can’t read it.
But we can guess. Look at her face:

Joyful Flower? A Radiant One? Sun On Water?

By Margaret Atwood