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NICARAGUA: Literacy Campaign Changing Women’s Lives

José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Apr 27 2009 (IPS) - Lorena Castillo was 10 years old when she was told that her lot in life was to become a good homemaker and a devoted wife and mother. But she would learn none of that at school, her father said when she asked to be allowed to go with her brothers to the school in her rural Nicaraguan village.

Castillo, who is from Chontales, 140 km northwest of the capital, was born into a heavily patriarchal home environment, where her father ruled the roost and decided the fate of his sons and daughters.

Three decades later, Castillo discovered that another world existed out there, and that life would have been different for her if only she could have learned to read and write when she was a little girl who dreamt of becoming a teacher.

Now, at the age of 40, she has completed an adult literacy course led by a 21-year-old volunteer who came out from Managua and opened up a world of new knowledge and experiences for her.

“I already wrote my first letter to my son, and I can understand some of the news,” Castillo, who has scraped by as a domestic for 30 years, told IPS with obvious pride.

There are thousands of women in Nicaragua who are just now seeing their horizons expand thanks to an ambitious literacy campaign carried out by the leftwing Sandinista government.

Education Minister Miguel De Castilla told IPS that the administration of Daniel Ortega has been working since the beginning of its term in 2007 on a massive literacy campaign, with the aim of declaring the country free of illiteracy on Jul. 19 – the 30th anniversary of the toppling of the 43-year Somoza family dictatorship by the Sandinista guerrillas.

The goal is for 772,000 illiterate Nicaraguans over 15 – 52 percent of whom are women – to complete their primary school education.

This is not the first Sandinista government to attempt to eradicate illiteracy. The so-called National Literacy Crusade was launched in 1980, a year after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, and reduced illiteracy from 52 to 12.9 percent of the population in one year.

According to official figures from the National Institute of Information on Development, over half a million Nicaraguans, out of a total population of 5.3 million at that time, were illiterate in 2005.

Today, the target is to bring the illiteracy rate below five percent – the threshold set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to declare a country free of illiteracy.

The current literacy campaign has 54,000 volunteers, 95 percent of whom are under the age of 30 and around 60 percent of whom are women. So far, 433,734 people have been taught to read and write, said De Castilla.

Through the campaign giving illiterate adults access to the educational system, the government is trying to advance towards the first three Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the international community in 2000, with a 2015 deadline: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, and promote gender equality and empowerment of women.

To fulfil the second MDG, Nicaragua would have to reach 100 percent primary school coverage, up from 75 percent of children enrolled in 1998 and 80 percent in 2006, according to the most recent report on Nicaragua’s progress towards the MDGs.

“The idea is not only to teach men and women to read and write, but to teach them to think in a different way,” said the minister. “A literate person has a better chance of escaping poverty than an illiterate person.”

From illiterate to teacher of thousands

Elba Rivera understands as well as anyone the meaning of what De Castilla says about education and poverty. She learned how to read and write in the 1980 campaign, thanks to which she was able to leave her life of rural poverty behind, and go on to earn a university degree in Nicaragua and a graduate degree in Germany.

Like Lorena Castillo, Rivera was kept from studying by her father’s cultural prejudices and sexist attitudes about the role of women in the countryside. She was 17 when she first held a pencil and learned to write her name.

Rivera is now director and founder of the Jan Amus Comenius school in the rural province of Nueva Guinea, 280 km southwest of Managua.

“I realised that the best way to help a country get ahead is by educating its people, and that is why I work hard every day to teach boys and girls, men and women, that we are all equal and that we all have the same rights,” she told IPS.

More than 10,000 peasant farmers of all ages have benefited from Rivera’s programme.

Rivera is one of eight women activists from around the globe who will have a chance to present their ideas on education, health and poverty in the developing South to the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) richest countries at their next annual summit in July.

The others are Rokeya Kabir from Bangladesh, Miranda Akhvlediani from Georgia, Jiraporn Limpananont from Thailand, Leonor Magtolis Briones from the Philippines, Sandhya Venkateswaran from India, Dorothy Ngoma from Malawi and Kadiatou Baby Maiga from Mali.

The women, selected by the global aid agency Oxfam International, have changed the lives of thousands of women through their innovative initiatives.

Rivera supports the literacy campaign that will teach over 400,000 women to read and write, but said much more is needed to achieve true gender equality in Nicaragua.

“There is no doubt that literacy changes the lives of women,” she said. “In my village, it was always said that women shouldn’t go to school because it was their duty to take care of their husbands. That has changed, which is a major accomplishment.

“The government’s effort to teach tens of thousands of women to read and to help them learn their rights is a good thing, but I think that a broader vision is needed to overcome the sexist perception that women learn to read in order to help their kids with their homework,” she said.

“Fighting illiteracy is an excellent idea, but it’s not enough to just teach people to read and write; the methods and the reproduction of sexist concepts in education must be changed – there are still teachers here who depict women as the weaker sex,” she complained.

According to Juanita Jiménez, a leader of the Autonomous Women’s Movement in Nicaragua (MAM), the idea of a literacy campaign is a positive step, but not sufficient for the country to live up to its comments in the fight against gender inequality.

“It is one thing to teach women to read and write, and another to promote gender equality and autonomy,” she told IPS. “In that sense, a literacy campaign is worthless if the same government trods on the rights of women.”

Challenges faced by women’s rights activists

Jiménez said that on one hand the government publicises its progress in terms of educating girls and women, while on the other it harasses feminist activists “and restricts women’s right to health and life by making therapeutic abortion illegal.”

Last year, the Sandinista government began to clamp down on women’s rights organisations like MAM because of their criticism of decisions and moves made by Ortega, even when he was the leader of the opposition, such as when he lined up Sandinista votes in 2006 to repeal the law on therapeutic abortion – i.e., to save a pregnant woman’s life – a step that women’s rights activists are fighting hard to overrule.

The harassment has included raids on the offices of several NGOs and the confiscation of their files and computers amid allegations that they had supported illegal abortions and engaged in improper financial dealings.

Activists see the persecution as a reaction to women’s rights groups’ attempts to get Ortega investigated or tried when his stepdaughter Zoilámerica Narváez accused him in 1998 of sexually abusing her from 1978, when she was 11 years old, until the end of his first term (1985-1990).

Ortega gave up his legislative immunity from prosecution in late 2001, but a court declared that the statute of limitations had expired, thus paving the way for his comeback as president in 2007.

Jiménez said the women’s movement taught more than 15,000 women – victims of domestic abuse – to read and write since 1990, when the Sandinistas lost power after 10 years of armed conflict with the U.S.-financed “contra” guerrillas.

Although the activist said the goals for female literacy are praiseworthy in a country with a heavily machista culture, she believes the country’s poverty and lack of resources will make it impossible to meet the MDGs by 2015.

“The figures for access to education have remained steady, but school dropout rates for girls show we are not doing well,” she said.

A 2006 study by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) revealed that for every 10 children who enrolled in primary school, only four completed it six years later.

Figures from the Education Ministry and the non-governmental Forum on Education and Human Development indicate that 700,000 schoolchildren are outside of the educational system this year.

Some 200,000 school-age children dropped out of school and 500,000 did not enroll in 2009, in a country where education is universal and free, but not obligatory.

Official statistics show that more boys than girls drop out of primary school: 55 percent of girls complete their primary education, compared to 45 percent of boys, who are often pulled out early to work and help support their families.

The government acknowledges that the country’s high poverty rates do not offer the best conditions to students, and that the Education Ministry does not have enough public schools or teachers to cover the needs.

The Ministry reports a classroom deficit of 57 percent nationwide, and says that out of 27,854 existing classrooms, only 12,181 are in good condition, and that out of 10,000 teachers needed this year, only 2,500 had been hired.

Nicaragua has a population of 5.7 million, 47 percent of whom are living on two dollars a day or less, according to official figures. It is the poorest country in Central America, and one of the poorest in the Americas.

Marisol Jarquín believes literacy is essential to improving the conditions of women’s lives.

The young volunteer from San Carlos, a town on Nicaragua’s southern border, 300 km from Managua, says there is nothing that pleases her more than reading the letters written to her by the peasant women she has taught, when they finish their basic education course.

“Poverty, violence, whatever; but a woman’s life is changed when she starts reading, and this is the best contribution that I can make to my country, to eliminate violence and poverty,” said Jarquín.