By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Sep 8 2002 (IPS)

In the remote, hilly and forested regions of northern Thailand, elephants are lending their weight for an enlightened cause — educating illiterate members of ethnic hilltribe communities in this South-east Asian country.

The pachyderms carry the learning materials for a non-formal education project aimed at promoting literacy for nearly 1,600 people living in 37 villages spread across the rugged terrain. From village to village, they bring books, learning aids and props such as a video player, a television set and a satellite dish and receiver.

Eight elephants have been roped into the Elephant Delivery Project because, Thai education authorities say, the environment makes it impossible for even rough-terrain vehicles to bring literacy materials to the communities that need them.

Thus, every month, the elephants and a team of riders, 12 teachers and four public health workers make their rounds from village to village, often spending three days in one locality.

This effort by Thailand’s ministry of education aims to bring into the fold of the country’s literate masses the adult members of the hill tribe communities, who have remained beyond the reach of the traditional education system.

These communities reached by the elephant project include mainly the Karen, along with other hill tribes such as the Mon and Lahu. There are up to 20 ethnic groups in northern Thailand, making up close to a million hill tribe people in this country of 63 million people.

According to UNESCO figures as of 1995, Thailand is home to 2.6 million illiterates – a number that is down from 3.5 million a decade earlier. As of 2000, the estimated adult literacy rate for Thailand was 96 percent, but hill tribe communities are not always included in this figure.

Apart from the Elephant Delivery Project, other efforts in South-east Asia are also underway to improve literacy among communities living in remote parts of a country – and reach those that fall through the holes of education systems and improve the quality of their literary achievements.

Like the Thai hilltribes, many communities left out of the formal education system are ethnic or linguistic minorities, who often also live in difficult-to-reach areas.

“Countries in this region still have illiterate youth and adults. These pockets exist among ethnic minority groups,” says Sheldon Shaeffer, director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Asia-Pacific regional bureau for education, ahead of International Literacy Day on Sep 8.

“The problem of people not being literate in the national language of the country is found in China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Indonesia,” he adds.

The remoteness of some communities in Laos is a factor in illiteracy and poverty and decades of war have taken their toll on Cambodia.

But in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia and Burma, there are community learning centres, often formed by the government, to bring literacy skills useful to the everyday lives of youth and adults, especially women who make up the majority of illiterates. Some make use of materials like newspapers.

Yet overall, countries in East Asia and the Pacific by 2000 had no less than impressive achievements. They had an adult literacy rate of 85.9 percent and youth literacy rate of 97.4 percent, according to the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report 2002, released late July.

By contrast, South Asia, where gender gaps are generally deeper than East Asia’s, had a 55.6 percent adult literacy rate and 69.8 percent youth literacy rate by 2000, according the UNDP report.

Countries that have topped 90 percent literacy levels among adults and youth in this region include Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Fiji and Vietnam. Indonesia, China and Malaysia have crossed the 90 percent scale for youth literacy but hover in the 80s for adult literacy.

The nations on the lower end of the literacy scale include Cambodia and Laos, both ravaged by years of war, and Papua New Guinea. Cambodia has 67.8 percent adult literacy and 78.9 percent youth literacy, Papua New Guinea has 63.9 percent and 75.7 percent and Laos has 48.7 percent and 70.5 percent.

The last UNESCO report on the progress of countries to achieve the target of halving literacy rates by 2015, set at the Education for All conference in Dakar, Senegal in 2000, says East Asia and the Pacific countries can meet this goal “by maintaining almost the same efforts as in the past decade”.

The region needs to increase its number of literates by 31.7 percent in order to meet the 2015 literacy goal, says UNESCO’s ‘Monitoring Report on Education for All -2001’.

The region’s performance would be helped in no small means by non-formal education, such as the Elephant Delivery Project – that uses creative ways of reaching communities that have special needs, either due to their physical, social or cultural environments, or have not benefited from schooling.

At the same time though, a major factor behind the good grades that East Asia and the Pacific has on literacy is the drive to ensure universal primary education over past decades.

“There has always been the push to get children to school,” says Kasama Varavarn, director general at Thailand’s department of education. “The government has committed funds for education – they are long-term and continuous.”

Tran Quoc Chan, head of literacy at Vietnam’s continuing education department, says that the roots of the country’s achievement of more than 94 percent of the primary education population enrolled, lie in political commitments made as early as 1945.

“The first campaign for the eradication of illiteracy (in Vietnam) was launched by Ho Chi Minh on September 8, 1945,” explains Chan.

Between 1990 to 2000, the Vietnamese government set up committees for literacy in every province, district and village.

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