Closing the gender gap: literacy for women and girls.

When you educate a mother, you educate a nation.

-proverb

Thirty-three-year-old Binta Badji felt an urgent "need" to learn to read and write after being unable to take notes or read class handouts during a three-day training course for village women on food processing. This motivated the Senegalese mother of two to join 60 other women in a literacy class. They were taught how to read and write in their native languages and to do simple arithmetic.

Sajjeda Begum is one of the few female administrators of a ration shop in the Dakshinpuri section of New Delhi. The 49-year-old mother of five, whose husband is unemployed due to ill health, was functionally illiterate until the age of 35 when she enrolled in a yearlong literacy course which also taught her basic accounting. Not only was she able to obtain her present job, she and other newly-literate friends became social activists, lobbying for clean drinking water, sanitation, drainage, hygiene and garbage collection in their working-class suburb.

Binta and Sajjeda are literacy success stories. UNESCO estimates that some two thirds of the estimated 965 million adult illiterates-637 million-are female. UNESCO also says that nearly half of the women in developing countries do not know how to read or write. While one of every, five men in the world is illiterate, as many as one third of all women cannot read and write. In some predominately rural countries, more than 90 per cent of women are illiterate.

UNESCO Director-General Federico Mayor says lack of advancement in the education of women and girls is "the heart of the problem of illiteracy". He calls women "the mothers of a literate society".

Female illiteracy is expected to be one of the focal points of International Literacy Year. Governments will be asked to target illiterate and functionally illiterate women and girls in education programmes. Women and development

Educated women are a vital component of development efforts, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In the report, Safeguarding the Future., UNFPA Executive Director, Dr. Nafis Sadik-a female medical doctor from Pakistan-writes: "In every country studied, researchers have discovered a close connection between the level of mothers' education and the size of their families." Educated women are also "more likely to protect their children's health", she says, adding that "for every year of mothers' education, child mortality is reduced 7 to 9 per cent".

According to another UN report, females have higher rates of illiteracy than males in all of the developing regions: South Asia-73 per cent (46 per cent male); North and sub-Saharan Africa-69 and 63 per cent (42 per cent male); West Asia-61 per cent (37 per cent male). For the least developed group as a whole, female illiteracy is 73 per cent and male, 53 per cent.

Seven South Asian nations have named 1990 the Year of the Girl Child in an effort to promote education for females.

Kaisa Savolainen, who directs UNESCO special education programmes, warns that long-term development will not flourish "unless women are able to read, write, calculate and understand their environment better".

The World Commission on Environment and Development reported in its 1987 study, Our Common Future, that improvements in the education of all, especially of women and in conjunction with other social changes that raise the status of women," can have a profound effect in bringing down population growth rates. Education can "enhance a society's ability to overcome poverty, increase incomes, improve health and nutrition, and reduce family size" the report also stated.

What holds women back?

Women and girls in developing countries suffer not only from decreased spending on education due to economic constraints, but also from traditional attitudes about women's role in society, particularly in rural areas. UNESCO has said that "traditional sex division in society has excluded more girls than boys from learning how to read and write in school". Statistics indicate that of the 116 million children aged 6 to 11 years old unable to attend primary school in 1985, some two thirds were girls.

Many women in the developing world spend hours each day on domestic tasks, including working in a field and carrying water. Women who bear many children also have limited time for continuing education. Despite the success of one UNESCO literacy project aimed at rural women, problems have nevertheless arisen because of "possessive husbands, negative influences exerted by adversaries of female emancipation, as well as exhausting demands of being a wife and a mother". UNESCO has found that literacy programmes which include child-care services and intensive periods of instruction are especially successful with women.

Making a

difference

In the remote regions of Nepal's mountainous Seti Zone, UNESCO and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are carrying out a pilot "education for rural development" programme. Out-of-school girls learn how to read, write and practise good health habits. Teachers are female, giving confidence to families that shun mixed-sex schools for their daughters. The girls share tips on health and cleanliness with their families.

Burkina Faso's Ministry of Rural Affairs launched an intensive campaign in 1988 to teach 13,000 rural women to read and write. Instruction was carried out in 10 languages, with the Ministry providing boarding centres during four residential sessions of 12 days each. Weekly breaks were given so that participants could return to their families, enhancing the popularity of the programme.