Rural women in El Salvador participate in a literacy class in the Santa Rosa canton of the municipality of Sensuntepeque, in the northern department of Cabañas. Education authorities in this Central American country have done very little to continue with programs that teach adults to read and write, especially in rural areas. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SENSUNTEPEQUE, El Salvador , Sep 4 2023 (IPS)

El Salvador’s efforts to improve the educational level in the country seem to be falling short, with rundown schools, especially in rural areas, and little progress in overcoming illiteracy.

In almost a decade, this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants has moved just two percentage points in its fight against illiteracy, going from 11.8 percent in 2013 to 9.7 percent in 2021, the last year with available official data.

Illiteracy is higher in rural areas: 15.2 percent. And among people over 60 years of age the rate is 45.7 percent"Sometimes I would go to the offices in the town of Ilobasco, and I felt bad when I saw signs with messages written on them and I couldn't understand the words." -- Carmen Molina

Literacy efforts in the freezer

Even more worrisome is the suspension in the last three years of the government’s adult literacy program in rural areas, people involved in this effort told IPS.

“It is worrying, the literacy program ceased to exist,” Verónica Majano, executive director of the non-governmental Association of Popular Education (CIAZO), told IPS.

Her organization has been working on literacy programs since 1989, during the country’s 1980-1992 civil war.

And now CIAZO is perhaps the only organization that still runs adult literacy programs in rural areas of the country.

Other institutions that carried out similar projects have given up because they say the education authorities have abandoned the national effort.

“It is not only stagnation, it is a setback; the COVID-19 pandemic affected initial, basic, middle and higher education, but right or wrong it has continued. But in literacy nothing is happening,” Majano stressed.

The cancellation or suspension of the government’s Literacy Program has become evident, she said, since Nayib Bukele became president in June 2019.

She added that the effort to teach reading and writing to those who did not have the opportunity to go to school, or who had to drop out for one reason or another, had previously continued regardless of which government was in power, left or right.

She was referring to the administrations of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, which governed for four terms between 1989 and 2009, and those of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which was in power for two terms between 2009 and 2019.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has pointed out that acquiring and improving literacy skills throughout life is an intrinsic part of the right to education and brings enormous empowerment and many benefits.

“Literacy drives sustainable development, enables greater participation in the labor market, improves child and family health and nutrition, reduces poverty and expands life opportunities,” the UN agency states.

According to UNESCO, a country can be declared free of illiteracy if less than 3.9 percent of the total population over 15 years of age is illiterate.

It has also stated that illiteracy is another form of modern slavery.

However, it notes that despite the progress made worldwide, 763 million adults still do not know how to read and write.

The hands of an elderly woman fill in a primer with which she is learning to read and write. Most of the women who participate in the literacy circle in Santa Rosa canton, in northern El Salvador, are over 60 years old. But that has not discouraged them from continuing to learn, despite the fact that some have vision problems and getting their eyes examined and buying glasses involves a cost that many cannot afford. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Academic Óscar Picardo told IPS that part of the problem in El Salvador is that, historically, the arrival of each new government has meant a change of strategy and vision on how to promote education in general and literacy programs in particular.

This has generated discontinuity with some of the achievements or progress made by the previous authorities, he said.

“The country and the Ministry of Education have had a recurring problem that is still present, which is the absence of state policies,” said Picardo, director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation, of the private Francisco Gavidia University.

He added; “The education system works with government policies, and every five years the whole system is rebooted, the minister changes and plans change, priorities change, but the major problems remain intact.”

The expert pointed out that if progress is to be made in education, and in particular in reducing illiteracy, the problem of school dropouts, caused by poverty and the insecurity generated by gangs, must be tackled.

According to official figures, 1.3 million people aged four to 29 (47.4 percent) reported not attending school in 2022.

The poverty rate stands at 26.6 percent of the population, but in the countryside the figure rises to 29.6 percent.

Picardo stressed that the so-called “war against gangs” waged since the end of March 2021 by the Bukele administration, which has succeeded in largely dismantling the operations of these criminal groups, is likely to lower the dropout rates and this is already reflected in the figures for the next school year.

“Of course, if the dropout rates decrease due to improved security that would be very positive; hopefully we will see statistics in that regard,” Picardo said.

The “mano dura” or iron fist strategy against the gangs, known here as “maras”, although it has largely dismantled the criminal activity of these groups, has also generated a dynamic of human rights violations and abuses by police and military authority that have been denounced by local and international human rights organizations.

With an average schooling of only 7.2 grades, it will be difficult for the Salvadoran populace to pull out of poverty and for the country to find foreign investment that offers better paying jobs, said the expert.

In El Salvador there are three grades of initial education, up to seven years of age on average. These are followed by nine grades of basic education, up to the age of 15, and three more of middle school, up to the age of 18. Schooling is considered compulsory until the completion of basic education.

Most other Central American countries face a similar problem to El Salvador, Picardo added, although Costa Rica has always shown better development in the educational and social areas, in general, and is the only country in the sub-region declared free of illiteracy.

The Salvadoran government has made a commitment to reducing the technological gap, with the distribution of thousands of laptops to elementary and high school students, which is an important achievement.

But the Bukele administration has also been criticized for the low level of investment in improving the conditions of most of the more than 5,000 schools in the country, especially in rural areas, and in remedying the deficiencies in teaching.

Blanca Velazco, a schoolteacher, shared with IPS the difficulties she faces every day in teaching essential knowledge to her kindergarten and first grade students, who share the same classroom at the Santa Rosa canton school in the municipality of Sensuntepeque, in the northern Salvadoran department of Cabañas.

“My first graders should be reading better by now, but I’ve had a hard time teaching them, because they are together with the kindergarteners, and that shouldn’t be the case,” said Velazco, 47.

She added that at 10:30 AM the kindergarteners leave and she only has 45 minutes to teach the first graders Language Arts and Math.

“”Forty-five minutes are not enough,” she stressed. In the afternoon, she also teaches fourth grade.

Livestock and small-scale and subsistence agriculture are the main economic activities in the canton of Santa Rosa, in the jurisdiction of Sensuntepeque, in northern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Winning the battle against illiteracy

In this canton, where some 50 families live, the Association of Popular Education, CIAZO, is organizing five literacy circles aimed at adults, mostly women, who want to win the fight against illiteracy.

Official figures reveal that of those who cannot read or write in El Salvador, 14.4 percent are women and 7.7 percent are men.

One of the literacy circles is made up of a dozen peasant women over the age of 60. Half of them were present when IPS visited the area on Aug. 28, and several of them are visually impaired due to their age, but they are not giving up.

“Sometimes I would go to the offices in the town of Ilobasco, and I felt bad when I saw signs with messages written on them and I couldn’t understand the words,” said Carmen Molina, 66, as she worked on a primer, writing words and solving simple addition and subtraction equations.

She said that as a child she attended school but only got as far as the second grade, and what little she learned was forgotten over the years.

“I didn’t want to go anymore,” she explained, because she had to take breakfast to her father and siblings to the milpa – the traditional agricultural system that intermingles corn with beans and vegetables. “And then coming all the way back to school was very hard,” she said.

She got up the courage to go to the literacy circle because some of her younger children would ask her what to write on their assignments.

“Some have a harder time learning than others, but in general they have advanced quite a bit, little by little,” said Flor Echeverría, 30, who has been teaching in the circle since the beginning of 2023.

Echeverría commented that she herself only studied up to the eighth grade and did not want to finish ninth grade, the last grade offered at the school she attended.

“At that time the facilities to go to school didn’t exist, everything was even more complicated,” she said.

“It’s nice to dedicate time to share knowledge with people who did not learn to read or write,” she said.

Although some men participate in the literary circle, such as Julio, Carmen’s son, the vast majority are women who have come to understand that learning to read and write is in itself an act of rebellion and also of liberation.

Women in Cambodia’s garments sector work 10-12 hours a day. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
PHNOM PENH, May 31 2014 (IPS)

The movement for reproductive justice sees women’s decision to have – or not have – children as a fundamental right. Should they choose to bear a child, women should have the right to care and provide for them; if they opt not to give birth, family planning services should be made available to enable women to space or prevent pregnancies.

In Cambodia, where women make up 60 percent of the population of 14 million people, this fundamental right is being trampled by insecure labour contracts, toxic working conditions and a near-total absence of maternity benefits for working mothers.

Take Cambodia’s garments industry, a massive sector that accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports. A full 90 percent of the workforce is female, but labour rights have not accompanied employment opportunities.

"[The] lack of labour rights for women [is] a worrying trend that is completely changing the culture of Cambodia.” -- Tola Moeun, head of the labour programme at the Community Legal Education Centre
Ever since the country entered into a liberalising agreement with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2005, long-term contracts have been edged out in favour of short term or fixed duration contracts (FDCs), the latter being far more popular among East Asian factory owners and western clothing brands like Gap, Walmart and H&M.

These informal arrangements “abuse garment workers’ reproductive rights,” Sophea Chrek, a former garment worker and technical assistant to the Workers Information Center (WIC) – which recently staged a fashion show to highlight the issue – told IPS.

“Women employed under FDCs for three to six months, or sometimes even one month, will not risk their job by having a baby. Usually, they choose to have an abortion…before the contract ends to ensure that the line leaders or supervisors are not aware of their pregnancy,” Chrek added.

According to Cambodian labour law, factories are supposed to provide maternity leave, but most get around this requirement with short contracts, which leave the estimated 600,000 workers vulnerable to employers’ whims.

Melissa Cockroft, a technical advisor on sexual and reproductive health, tells IPS that women without access to family planning services resort to unsafe and unregulated measures, such as using over-the-counter Chinese products to induce abortions.

These methods can be fatal, but women seem hesitant to avail themselves of NGO-provided free or discounted service at on-site infirmaries, which are less confidential.

Sometimes their grueling schedules, which include 10 to 12-hour workdays with only a short lunch break in between, keep them from making appointments. Many of these women, Cockroft says, are just too busy to even think of starting families.

Garment workers’ reticence to use reproductive services can be cultural too, as talking about sexual health is considered ‘shameful’ in traditional Cambodian society.

Cambodian law also stipulates that factories provide working mothers with childcare, but Cockroft says she has only seen one operational childcare facility during all her years as an advocate in the field.

For some women, the decision to leave their children at home emerges from a desire to spare them the grueling commute – many factory workers travel shoulder-to-shoulder in trucks or on compact wagons pulled by tuk tuks, ubiquitous motorcycle taxis, down Cambodia’s notoriously unsafe roads.

Very often, babies remain at home with their grandmothers in the countryside while their mothers go off to work in the city, where they earn roughly 100 dollars per month. Union leaders are trying to raise this minimum wage to 160 dollars.

In general, though, both Cockroft and Chrek say garment workers consider themselves “too poor” to have children.

Entertainers and street workers

Meanwhile, in Cambodia’s popular entertainment sector, women face a unique set of challenges, their access to reproductive health services hindered by the informal and unpredictable nature of their work.

Independent researcher Dr. Ian Lubek tells IPS that entertainment workers are likely to experience a much higher risk of foetal alcoholic syndrome due to the number of beverages they are forced to consume every night in order to get tips from their customers. Research from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) suggests that a female beer seller or hostess consumes up to 11 drinks a night.

Years of advocacy efforts have at least enabled entertainers working for international beer companies to secure better wages, with women employed by the Cambrew brewery now drawing a salary of close to 160 dollars a month.

Higher wages, according to Phal Sophea, former beer seller and representative for the Siem Reap division of the Cambodia Food and Service Workers Federation (CFSWF), amounts to less economic pressure to have transactional sex.

“I think better pay will reduce sex work because the [women] generally go out with customers when the pay is too low,” she told IPS.

Of all the groups of working women struggling to raise children, street-based sex workers are among the most marginalised and are often subject to police violence, arrests and forced detention in anti-trafficking ‘reeducation centres’.

While unions for entertainment workers can negotiate contracts, sex workers are left completely vulnerable to the laws of the streets.

Labour research indicates that Cambodians living in urban areas require, at the very least, 150 dollars a month in order to survive; most salaries are set below 100 a month, making it very difficult for the average working Cambodian to make ends meet, and feed their families. As it is, 40 percent of Cambodian children are chronically malnourished.

WNU Board Member Socheata Sim explained that sex work might be the only option for the many women without a formal education; according to a report on education levels among women in Cambodia, only one-third of school-aged girls are enrolled at the lower secondary school level, and one in ten at the upper secondary school level.

Many sex workers want a better life for their children, but few can afford the high fees, bribes and related costs of formal schooling.

Furthermore, sex workers living in slum dwellings face a constant threat of eviction. Tola Moeun, head of the labour programme at the Community Legal Education Centre, told IPS that high rates of evictions are now forcing many women to migrate abroad in search of employment.

“Yet once abroad, if undocumented, migrant workers find they do not have the rights citizens have,” he lamented.

In Thailand, for instance, where tens of thousands of Cambodian women now live and work, undocumented workers are fired from their jobs if they become pregnant, are denied maternity leave and earn half the 300-baht (nine-dollar) daily minimum wage.

Tola sees the “lack of labour rights for women as a worrying trend that is completely changing the culture of Cambodia.”

(END)

School children in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jul 7 2013 (IPS)

Many Pacific Island nations are celebrating the success of rising school enrolment rates, with 14 members of the 16-member Pacific Island Forum on target to meet Millennium Development Goal 2: achieving universal primary education by 2015.

But a closer look inside the classroom, and in communities surrounding these schools, reveals a shockingly low literacy rate.

Two organisations – the Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education (ASPBAE) and Papua New Guinean Education Advocacy Network (PEAN) – teamed up to assess the impact of formal education on people between the ages of 15 and 60 years in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea, a southwest Pacific Island nation of just over seven million people.

“There is very little exposure to books in the home and in schools, and many children do chores to supplement family income after school, so they have no time to read." -- Lice Taufaga, lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji.
Their findings suggest that so-called strides in education have not yielded much concrete success: the literacy rate in the national languages of English and Tok Pisin was just 23 percent, with many students unable to read or write after completing primary education.

Similar findings have been reported in Melanesian countries throughout the southwest Pacific region:  in 2011, ASPBAE surveyed 1,475 people aged over 15 years in the Shefa Province of the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, and discovered that while 85 percent declared they could read and write a simple letter in the official languages of Bislama, French or English, individual testing confirmed that only 27.6 percent were literate.

Vanuatu boasts a primary enrolment rate of 88 percent, and although 90 percent of respondents had experienced some formal education, only 40 percent completed primary school.

In the Solomon Islands, an archipelago nation located southeast of Papua New Guinea, the government has claimed remarkable recovery from a five-year-long civil war (1998-2003), with primary school enrolment at 91 percent. However, poor school facilities in rural areas and disinterest in formal learning have been cited as contributing factors to a critically low literacy rate of 17 percent.

While 97.7 percent of the 2,200 people surveyed by ASPBAE in the capital, Honiara, and in Malaita Province agreed that it was important for children to attend school, 53.8 percent of females and 37.6 percent of males, aged 15 to 19 years, were not in education.

“The issue of low literacy is prevalent mainly with those who are learning in a language other than their primary one,” Lice Taufaga, lecturer at the school of education at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, told IPS.  “Literacy is best learnt in one’s primary language, yet most learners in South Pacific countries are expected to achieve it in English, the language of business and administration.”

Taufaga added that there were also cultural challenges, as the solitary activity of reading was not always encouraged or supported in many communal-oriented Pacific societies.

“There is very little exposure to books in the home and in schools, and many children do chores to supplement family income after school, so they have no time to read,” she said.

The linguistic diversity of the region, which contains a population of 10 million and one fifth of the world’s languages – plus European languages introduced during the colonial era – makes literacy a complex issue.

In Melanesian countries, there are hundreds of commonly used local vernacular languages, many of which are only oral. These are used by 88 percent of the population in Vanuatu, while 60 percent claim to utilise the national languages of Bislama, English or French in everyday communication.

Yet low literacy also extends to national indigenous languages, with a World Bank study last year in the Polynesian South Pacific state of Tonga concluding that only three in 10 students who had engaged with three years of primary education were able to read fluently enough in either English or Tongan to comprehend content.

More than a decade ago Pacific educationalists began rethinking the legacy of introduced western curriculums and claiming a priority for Pacific languages and cultures within the education process.  However, the reality is that a bilingual approach remains, with English and French perceived as necessary for engaging in a global world.

“The long term impacts of low literacy levels in English and French are a key concern because much of the information about development is only available in English or French, hence a higher level of literacy in these languages will enhance transfer of technology, information and knowledge at all levels of society,” Rex Horoi, director of the Foundation of the Peoples of the South Pacific told IPS, although he is supportive of translation into vernacular languages.

“It is critically important that Pacific people have direct access to information relevant for their sustainable livelihoods and improvement of life in the language they understand and communicate in…” Horoi emphasised.

Government budgets do not appear to be the main issue, although their allocation raises questions about the delivery of quality education.

According to the World Bank, 23.7 percent of Vanuatu’s government expenditure is allocated to education and this rises to 34 percent in the Solomon Islands, compared to approximately 16.1 percent in New Zealand and 13.5 percent in Australia.

However, up to 90 percent of Pacific Island education budgets are committed to teachers’ salaries, with little funds left to develop education systems, infrastructure and resources.

Inadequately qualified teachers are another issue, especially in light of evidence that only 29 percent of teachers in the Solomon Islands and 54 percent in Vanuatu are trained.

According to Taufaga, many “who are teaching English lack the proficiency to model or teach it well.”  She also pointed out that urban class sizes in the region can be as large as 40 to 50 students and most schools cannot afford suitable books for reading.

Remote students remain the most disadvantaged, with poor education facilities and lack of basic materials plaguing rural communities. In Papua New Guinea, similar to the neighbouring Solomon Islands, approximately 80 percent of schools do not have libraries.

“People keep talking about quality education,” a school graduate named Niniu Oligao told IPS in Honiara. “I believe in people reading books in order to be able to write in full sentences and be exposed to meaningful ideas.”

Oligao is so concerned about the repercussions of the absence of a library in the Takwa Community Primary and High School, an institution of 2,000 students based in the North Malaita Province, that he has taken it upon himself to build a collection of donated books. Though he has no funding, he hopes this initiative will form the beginnings of a library for students’ research.

Addressing poor literacy now is vital to improving students’ chances of completing secondary and tertiary qualifications and empowering Pacific Islanders to contribute to social and economic development, whether at the local, national or regional level.