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46 EFA Mid-Decade Assessment5EFA Goal Four: Improving Adult Literacy5.1 Identification of IssuesPresenter: Aaron Benavot, Global Monitoring Team, ParisOne hundred sixty-four governments adopted the current goals of EFA, acknowledgingformally the importance of a holistic vision of education, spanning early childhoodthrough adulthood.Literacy is the foundation of learning. It constitutes a critical life skill, a requisite forsuccessful participation in society and fundamental for economic, social and politicalparticipation and development in the knowledge society. Literacy is key to enhancingcapabilities, with wide-ranging benefits including critical thinking, improved health andfamily planning, HIV/AIDS prevention, children’s education, poverty reduction andactive citizenship. Literacy is key for the achievement of the other EFA goals.However, the 2006 EFA Global Monitoring Report reports that literacy is a right stilldenied to nearly a fifth of the world’s adult population.Underlying problems remain with conventional literacy data. Conventional statistics arebased on dichotomous conceptions and indirect assessment. In other words,individuals are defined as literate or illiterate, leaving nothing in between. Thesedefinitions are usually drawn from one of three possible data sources:● Respondent reports of his/her own literacy level (self-declaration)● Head of household declarations (third party assessment)● Literacy proxy indicators – most commonly, number of years of schoolingcompleted (educational attainment proxy)Tentative conclusions from direct literacy assessments throughout the world show that:●●●Conventional literacy data overstate the reality of the literate environmentThe gap between direct and indirect assessment is highest among the leasteducated and where school quality is weakestLiteracy skills vary between official and local languagesEducation for All: Reaching the Unreached