WATANI International
22 August 2010
The figures on illiteracy in Egypt are at best alarming. In the fourth national conference for youth, held earlier this year at Luxor University to discuss the status of youth in Egypt, the issue of the elimination of illiteracy came to the fore. The statistics cited revealed there are 17 million illiterates in Egypt—69 per cent of them female—and the rates are higher in Upper Egypt and rural areas.
The 522 young people from all over the country attending the conference heard Education Minister Ahmed Zaki Badr describe illiteracy as one of the worst dangers threatening the community. Raafat Radwan, head of the general authority for adult education, said the eradication of illiteracy was a national project that needed to be adopted through a dedicated Egypt Day, with the aim of eliminating illiteracy among five million young people aged between 15 and 35.
“This project could be realised if it made use of international experiments achieved by several other countries such as Cuba, Malaysia, Thailand and Mexico,” Dr Radwan said.
Grave failure
A number of official reports expose the pitiful results yielded by all previous attempts to battle illiteracy and educate adults. “This means we must revive the invitation made at the turn of the millennium to dedicate the next five years to eliminating illiteracy,” Dr Salah Sabie who is in charge of the basic education unit in Caritas, one of the oldest and well-established NGOs in Egypt, told Watani. “This initiative was followed by the announcement of a national project to eliminate illiteracy between 2003 and 2007 in the age group between 15 and 35, which includes some five or six million illiterates. The move threw the ball in the court of the Education Ministry which is mainly responsible for people dropping out of education.”
For its part, the general authority for adult education, Dr Sabie said, launched a plan which makes it mandatory for persons applying for ID cards to submit a certificate of literacy.
If we are serious about eradicating illiteracy among Egyptians, however, Dr Sabie said, civil society should join in the efforts. So far, he said, most NGOs operate programmes for eliminating illiteracy, especially those NGOs basically concerned with education. Upper Egypt has seen one of the most successful efforts to battle illiteracy, he reminded, that of the one-class schools set up by the Upper Egypt society for Education and Development.
Help from libraries
Dr Sabie told Watani that, since its launch in 1972 with six courses in Cairo and Alexandria, the Caritas programme for adult learning has expanded to offer some 660 courses for adult learners. Yet its achievements are paled by the growing rates of illiteracy. “We stand between eliminating illiteracy and programmes of development and health awareness which would give learners the skills to help them improve their income and social activities,” he says.
There has been recent contact with libraries in regions where literacy classes are being held to offer books and periodicals in simple colloquial language to the learner. “This will give us the opportunity to interact with these learners and to help some of them to obtain their own ID cards by themselves,” Dr Sabie said.
Interaction with civil societies on the popular level provides the ability to achieve vital programmes compared with the literacy programmes offered by the government. “As a civil society we did not have a problem with finding classrooms because the classes are held in the villagers’ houses or even their backyards,” Dr Sabie said. “The problem lies in finding an ideal programme that relates to the learners’ lives.”
“Learn… Liberate”
In reply to a question from Watani about the programme’s goal of “Learn…Liberate”, Dr Sabie said that it was inspired by the experience and philosophy of the Brazilian expert in adult education, Paulo Ferreri, which relies on the concept of mutual dialogue with learners. “At first we faced the problem that the learners were bored and felt that despite their age they were being treated like children. So our programme is based on respecting them. This is a kind of investment in the various individual abilities of the learners.” He added that success often depended on one learner extolling his or her experience to siblings and parents, especially in families in rural areas.
As cited in the fourth youth conference, the national budget for adult education over the past three years amounted to EGP206 billion. Unfortunately, however, according to Dr Sabie, government officials tend to see illiteracy as a national shame and dislike admitting the real numbers of illiterates in Egypt.