Today, 750 million adults around the world are unable to read and write. Project Literacy and R4D are taking a collaborative approach to closing the literacy gap by convening literacy program implementers, researchers and funders to co-create solutions.
The Challenge
Despite decades of efforts, the literacy gap remains staggering: today, 750 million adults are still unable to read and write (UNESCO 2017). Illiteracy is a global challenge that spans geographic, racial, gender, and status boundaries and its consequences extend beyond the ability to read and write. Those with limited literacy skills are less able to access and utilize essential information that would enable them to fully participate in society and the workforce. As a result, people struggling with literacy commonly have lower health and educational outcomes, fewer employment prospects and generally, less financial stability. These negative outcomes compound at the societal level as countries struggling with literacy have a less healthy, educated or capable workforce, the global annual cost of which is estimated to be $1.19 trillion (World Literacy Foundation 2012).
The Opportunity
While there has been some progress — from 2000 to 2015, global adult and youth literacy rates only grew by approximately 4 percent (UNESCO 2016), the pace has not kept up with international targets and the field is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target: “By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy.”
Project Literacy, a global campaign founded and convened by Pearson, is aiming higher, with a goal to eliminate illiteracy by 2030 through partnerships and action. As part of this effort, Project Literacy, with the support of R4D, established a global Community of Practice in 2018 that virtually convenes over 100 literacy practitioners in 20 countries to collectively tackle core barriers to closing the literacy gap. Working group members include implementers, researchers, and funders of literacy programs and include partners from the Project Literacy campaign run by Pearson and programs from R4D’s Center for Education Innovations.
Our Work
In 2018, we kicked off the Community of Practice through 5 co-designed working groups after guiding a collaborative process to define key topics and objectives. Each of the five working groups identified common challenges across literacy programs and are now co-creating solutions to address them and support themselves and literacy practitioners at-large:
- Parent engagement in literacy: With focus on increasing parental involvement in their children’s education, working group members are creating a needs assessment tool for program implementers to better gauge context and inform the design of parent engagement activities to increase literacy.
- Teacher training for literacy: Acknowledging the widespread gap between accessing best practices in teaching literacy and in utilizing those practices, working group members are focusing their efforts on gathering available resources that teacher trainers and program implementers can use to support teachers as they adapt good literacy teaching practices to their local contexts.
- Communications for Literacy:The Communications working group members are creating a 7-stop storytelling roadmap to equip program implementers and central organizational staff to collect, develop, and share the stories of their literacy focused work.
- Technology for Literacy:The Technology group is leveraging their practitioner experience to enhance existing guidance on technology use for supporting literacy. The guidance focuses on four specific populations and settings – low resource and low connectivity settings, persons with disabilities, adults, and people who choose not to use technology despite having access to it – and will be accompanied by illustrative practitioner examples.
- Measuring the Impact of Literacy Programs: The group’s members are creating an inventory of existing literacy assessments to enable literacy practitioners to easily identify assessment tools suitable for their context and needs.
R4D and Project Literacy are pleased to work with leaders from around the world to tackle these challenges. R4D continues to facilitate and provide research and analytical support as working group members jointly develop these tools and resources. The co-developed tools and resources will be completed in early 2019 and launched publicly soon after.
This work builds on R4D’s past engagements with Project Literacy, including support to Read to Kids (Promoting Literacy in India through Mobile Technology), a midline evaluation of Project Literacy itself, and A Landscape Analysis of the Global Literacy Sector.
