Literacy, Women Empowerment
and Sustainable Development
Two-thirds
of the world's adult illiterates are women. The Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, outline a
new and ambitious worldwide commitment to achieving gender equality in
education, particularly through Goal 4: “to ensure inclusive and
equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities
for all”.
To address the phenomenon of adult
illiteracy, timely and adequate policy intervention is a necessary
condition. In the Indian context, most of the policy emphasis was on
literacy through formal schooling only. The complementary nature of
informal adult education programmes never attracted policy attention.
However, since the mid-1970s, policy initiatives took place in the form
of the National Adult Education Programme in 1978. The most recent
policy endeavour has been the Saakshar Bharat Mission, a centrally
sponsored scheme launched in 2009 to promote and strengthen adult
education with particular focus on women.
Unfortunately, policy makers have given
little attention to the social processes associated with literacy
learning and development. There is a need of a wider lens on literacy in
order to explore not only 'what works' in practical terms of encouraging
women to participate in programmes, but also to look at the 'why and
how' literacy programmes can contribute to sustainable development and
the processes of empowerment.
Adult learning and education aims to promote
competencies which are associated with sustainable development,
including critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and
participatory teaching and learning. Designing effective adult learning
opportunities requires greater recognition of how non-formal, formal and
informal learning interact. Policy proposals need to focus more
specifically on the following:
-
Develop appropriate strategies and
institutional mechanisms to reach out to adult female illiterates.
-
Incorporate modules on women's rights,
gender sensitivity, reproductive health, family life and women's
participation in community affairs in adult literacy and learning
programmes.
-
Integrate the linkages of literacy to
livelihood in the literacy initiatives more strategically.
Literacy policy needs to start from a more
holistic perspective on development interventions so as to maximise
cross-sectoral interaction and support from the outset. Through
research, the contextualised understanding to inform decisions on
pertinent aspects (like which literacy teaching approach to be adopted;
whether to target a specific group of women, or women and men more
generally; how to challenge existing forms of gender oppression and what
other kind of legal, financial, organisational, skills development
support may be required) needs to be studied and explored to finalise
the operational aspects of the literacy policy.
A transformative approach to the empowerment
of women needs to be developed particularly in relation to the social
equality paradigm. As the resourcing of literacy programmes is the
greatest obstacle, the importance of literacy to sustainable development
and the empowerment of women should be explicitly recognised within the
post-2015 Education for All goals, as a first step towards mobilising
adequate resources for adult education and lifelong learning. National
governments and international donor agencies should prioritise greater
budget allocation to adult literacy programmes and the literacy
components of sustainable development programmes; and the International
agencies should mobilise private companies to develop partnerships with
national adult literacy programme for improving access to new technology
and funding streams. The results of all the above interventions can be
extensive and far reaching. ■
Alka Srivastava
asrivastava@devalt.org
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