Development & Aid, Education, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Poverty & SDGs

EDUCATION: Fighting Illiteracy, Cuban-Style

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Feb 11 2005 (IPS) - “It was like emerging from a tunnel, towards the light,” said Eugenia Tua, who learned how to read and write at the age of 65 in Venezuela, where more than 1.3 million adults have left illiteracy behind thanks to a campaign based on a teaching method designed in Cuba.

This socialist island nation also provided the teaching materials, as well as instructors, for the successful literacy drive launched in Venezuela in 2003, called “Yo sí puedo” (“I Can Do It”).

In the second phase of the literacy campaign, “Yo sí puedo seguir” (I Can Continue), the newly literate adults are able to complete their primary school education.

But Venezuelans are not the only ones who have benefited from Cuba’s adult literacy programme, which has been adapted for use in a number of countries, mainly in Latin America and Africa.

Tua and other Latin Americans who have learned to read and write using the Cuban method discussed their personal experiences, at an international conference on teaching and a congress on literacy held in late January and early February in Havana.

Other participants in the two gatherings included teachers and local authorities from the countries where the Cuban technique has been applied.

The method associates letters with numbers, allowing it to be adapted to any language. The technique has also been used with blind and deaf people.

One of the participants, Ruhia King, is adapting the Cuban literacy tool for use with the hearing-impaired in New Zealand.

According to Marcia Krawll, the coordinator of the project in New Zealand, one in five people in that country of four million is functionally illiterate.

Using the literacy method developed in Cuba, 1,022 adults in New Zealand have been taught to read and write since June 2003, and another 5,400 have registered for courses for completing primary school, said Krawll.

The method has also been used successfully in Mexico. “I coach a football team in my community, and I needed to be able to write down the positions of my players. Now I do it slowly, but I can do it,” said Benjamín Abarca, 55, a campesino (peasant farmer) from the southern Mexican state of Michoacán.

Three municipalities in that state have been declared “free of illiteracy” since the Cuban programme began to be implemented there.

Michoacán Governor Lázaro Cárdenas said he expects the illiteracy rate in his state to drop from 14 to 8.5 percent by late 2005.

“In Michoacán we have decided to put an end to illiteracy,” said Cárdenas. The programme “has no political slant at all,” nor does it take jobs away from the staff in existing educational institutions, he added.

Abarca said he would continue his studies: “I need to know more, because, for example, I don’t know how to write a formal request yet.”

Francisco Laine, a small farmer from Ecuador, said learning how to read and write changed his life. Regional authorities in his country have promised to translate the method into Quechua, the language of that Andean nation’s largest indigenous group.

The method is currently being applied in five Latin American nations, and is being used in pilot programmes in three others. The classes, for example, have been given in the Creole language spoken in Haiti, in English, French and Portuguese, and by radio.

Cuban Education Minister Luis Ignacio Gómez said that in 12 years, 1.5 billion people in the world could learn to read and write and complete their primary school education, with an initial investment of three billion dollars in the first three years and 700 million in each of the following nine years.

That estimate is lower than the amount called for by a recent study by ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) and UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation).

The joint study, which was released in late January in the Chilean capital, says that eradicating illiteracy in Latin America and the Caribbean (where 39 million adults are illiterate) by 2015 would require nearly seven billion dollars.

Those seven billion dollars are included in the 150 billion dollars that the study estimates are necessary in order for the countries in the region to meet four internationally agreed targets in the area of education by the 2015 deadline.

There are more than 860 million illiterate adults in the world and 150 million children who do not attend school, according to UNESCO.

That makes it virtually impossible to meet, in the next 10 years, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the U.N. general assembly in September 2000.

Eradicating adult illiteracy is one of the MDGs, as is achieving universal primary school coverage.

The region has also assumed other commitments involving education, including universal preschool coverage for three to five-year-olds and 75 percent secondary school coverage by 2015.

When the U.N. Literacy Decade was declared in January 2003, it was underlined that literate societies are essential for combating serious problems like poverty, infant mortality and inequality.