EDUCATION-PERU: Literacy Programme Targets Women

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Zoraida Portillo

LIMA, Dec 11 1999 (IPS) - Cirila Caceres lifts her six-month-old son to her breast and begins to feed him while waiting for the arrival of the instructor of her reading class.

She is just one of the thousands of Peruvian women learning to read and write as part of a new literacy programme, which has won an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Programme (UNESCO).

“It’s a new approach to literacy that dovetails with the problems of day-to-day life,” says Narda Ponce de Leon, the subdirector of the National Literacy Programme of the Women’s Ministry.

“This way, instruction in reading and writing goes hand in hand with information about civil rights, violence prevention and family and reproductive health,” she adds.

“Let’s see, Maria, what did the doctor tell you about your baby?” the instructor asks one of her students, a robust woman of about 35.

“That he was malnourished, miss,” the woman responds. “Could you write that word, please?” the teacher presses.

Classes take place in a humble structure located on Lima’s main highway – a neighbourhood where, until a few years ago, people were terrorised by the guerrilla group Shining Path and community life virtually was paralysed.

Now, however, this improvised classroom graduated Nieves Cencho, one of the winners of the National Writing Contest promoted by the programme.

“I feel important…I can actually help my kids with their homework,” she marvelled.

The rate of illiteracy is surprisingly high in this metropolitan area, located just 10 minutes from downtown Lima. Over the last decade, Peru has seen a sharp rise in urban illiteracy generally, as a result of migration from the countryside.

The overall illiteracy rate in Peru, a nation of 24 million inhabitants, is just 7.74 percent but this figure obscures the fact that 18 percent of women over the age of 15 cannot read or write.

Put another way, 73 percent of all illiterate Peruvians are women, and of that number, 45 percent are indigenous and do not speak Spanish.

This reality has been factored into the creation of literacy programmes and, for the first time, 2,500 bilingual instructors have been trained and dispatched to communities in the high Andean peaks and jungles, where they are teaching Quechuas and Aymaras, as well as the 10 ethnic Amazonian groups, how to read and write in their own languages.

There are currently about 100,000 people benefitting from these programmes.

The idea of bilingual instruction, which also incorporates training in productive activities geared toward boosting incomes, won Peru the 15,000 dollars Rey Sejonj Prize from UNESCO.

The prize money will help cover the salaries of the 30,000 men and women who teach four-hour classes three days per week, for which they are paid 71 dollars.

“For anyone giving literacy instruction, the economic benefits are secondary to the satisfaction of making it possible for a person to read and write,” said Maria Rivera, an obstetrician from the Andes, who decided to take part in the experiment when she was unable to get a job in her field.

Besides fulfilling a social objective, the programme has ended up providing work for thousands of unemployed.

Freddy Caso, an industrial mechanic and the zone coordinator for the northern cone of Lima, always personally assumes the cost of his transportation when he must inspect the literacy classes.

The programme also has volunteers from academic institutes, as well as retired educators and personnel from the armed forces, who are sent primarily to the zones on the border and those still under threat from guerrillas or drug traffickers.

According to the programme’s official statistics, 70 percent of the nearly half a million participants are women, most of whom have children and families. But there is also a large number of young people between the ages of 16 and 18, especially in the rural areas.

The target goals are ambitious: to reduce the rate of illiteracy to 3.5 percent by the end of 2000, while at the same time training the beneficiaries in income-generating activities.

Last year, the programme introduced 586 teaching units in the country’s north, an area that was impacted by the El Nino weather phenomenon, and five more are planned next year for Huancavelica, considered the poorest department in Peru, as well as three for the Amazon region.

To the architects of the programme, the key continues to be the focus on development as the only way to make people understand the need for men and women to be on equal footing when it comes to reading and writing, and to overcome the cultural barriers to girls acquiring this skill.