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EDUCATION: Women Key to Literacy in the Home

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 4 2006 (IPS) - “A literate woman makes a literate family,” says Cuban teacher Leonela Relys, who created a successful method for teaching reading and writing, which can be adapted to different languages and cultures.

“This literacy programme can be contextualised in countries as different and far apart as Bolivia, East Timor and New Zealand, because it’s based on universal principles that any human being can understand,” Relys said in an interview with IPS.

Relys is the creator of the “Yes I can!” programme to teach basic literacy skills, which has been implemented, is currently being applied or is being used in pilot projects in 18 countries in Latin America and other regions with high illiteracy rates, according to Cuban officials.

“Most illiterate people in the world are women, because of sexism, inequality, social discrimination, and the lack of employment opportunities. Because of all of these, it is our principle to focus on women first,” she said.

A joint study by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), published in February 2005, indicated that there are 39 million illiterate adults in this region, most of whom live in rural areas, belong to ethnic minorities, or are poor.

Nearly seven billion dollars would be needed to eradicate illiteracy over the next nine years, according to the report. Universal basic education for both girls and boys by 2015 is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2000.

However, at a conference of educationists last year in Havana, Cuban authorities calculated that over 12 years, some 1.5 billion people worldwide could learn to read and write, and complete their primary education, with an initial investment of three billion dollars in the first three-year period and 700 million dollars in each of the following nine years.

According to UNESCO, 11 percent of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean is illiterate, compared to 40 and 45 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, respectively.

In the year 2000, the total number of illiterate people in the world amounted to 876 million, 563 million of whom were women, according to UNESCO.

“That’s why we have to make women the top priority. A mother who can read and write won’t let her children be illiterate, and she will promote an interest in reading, in understanding the world through books, in her home,” Relys commented.

The programme is based on audiovisual aids such as television and video, to minimise the costs of literacy campaigns and reach the maximum number of people. The method used is the association of letters with numbers, with which illiterate people are already familiar, having acquired this empirical knowledge “through the necessities of life.”

The most frequently used letters are vowels, represented by the numbers one to five, while number six is associated with the letter L. “Letters are not taught in alphabetical order, but by their frequency of use,” the teacher explained.

“House,” “kiss,” “family,” “sun” and “moon” are the first words that students learn to read and write, according to the primer shown by the teacher. “They are common words in anybody’s life, no matter where they come from or where they live,” she explained.

The Cuban programme consists of 65 televised classes lasting 30 minutes each. On average, illiterate adults learn to read and write in just three months, but the principle of the programme is that they should continue to study until they have completed primary education, at least.

In Relys’s opinion, the gender issue is present in a very “veiled” form in the “subtext” of the course, which includes a dramatised scene featuring three women and two men, “symbolising the higher percentage of women who are illiterate, and showing that they can, indeed, learn.”

The teacher, too, is a woman, while another woman represents young people who have not had educational opportunities. Yet another is working, but cannot aspire to a better job because she can’t read or write.

“Another represents indigenous women, who are the most heavily exploited all over the world, and shows that they have the intelligence and ability to learn to read and write. All of this is intentionally included in the televised lessons,” Relys explained..

The “Yes I can!” method began to be used last month in Bolivia, a country with a population of nearly nine million, where more than one million people are illiterate, according to official statistics.

The literacy campaign launched by the leftwing government of Evo Morales – who took office in January – envisages teaching more than 700,000 people to read and write by the end of the year, and as of June the programme will also cover indigenous languages such as Aymara, Quechua and Guaraní.

It is estimated that in Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru, there are less than 90 literate women for every 100 literate men.

Meanwhile, Venezuela declared itself to be “illiteracy-free” last October, when it announced that nearly 1.5 million adults had learned to read and write over the previous two years through a literacy drive based on the “Yes I can!” programme. At 58, Relys still has an unfulfilled dream of returning to Haiti to finalise the launch of educational plans that were truncated two or three years ago by the unstable internal political situation there.

“We learned on the ground in Haiti that in order to implement these programmes that have a global design, we need to respect people’s identities, customs, religion, idioms, culture – the particular characteristics of each place,” she said.

Relys had travelled to Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, in 1997 to give a week’s seminar on in-classroom literacy teaching, a system which turned out to be incompatible with conditions in the country. Two years later, she returned to direct a literacy campaign based on radio broadcasts in the native language, Creole, and in French.

“That’s where I came to really understand discrimination against women, and the level of superstition that exists in the country, where there are remote, inaccessible areas where illiteracy is even more common,” she described.

She explained that the ground first had to be prepared with in-depth community work, to raise awareness in Haitian society. Understanding and intervention by the local churches was needed, and they were approached “seeking common interests and their approval of what we wanted to do, for the benefit of the Haitian people.”

“The greatest support we had in Haiti was from the Catholic Church. The priests helped us to persuade women to attend the courses, because a woman who can read and write also learns about the environment, health and hygiene, and about raising her children better, and having a better family life,” Relys said.