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

 

Back to Contents

  Share Subscribe Home

Contact Us

About Us