Literacy Trends in Pakistan - UNESCO Islamabad

Flexible programmes: diverse and meaningful literacies require flexible modes of acquisition and delivery, using appropriate materials andlanguages, focusing on relevant purposes, and generating interesting, culturally relevant and gender-sensitive materials at the local level. Welltrainednon-formal facilitators will respect learners’ needs. Programmes should enable learners to move on to more formal learningopportunities.Capacity-building: as well as increasing and improving the training of literacy facilitators, capacity-building will focus on areas which needstrengthening in particular countries. These may include the planning and management of programmes, research and documentation, materialproduction and curriculum design.Research: new policies for literacy will be most effective when they are based on the results of empirical research. This will answer questionssuch as: what is the long-term impact of literacy? How can local communities better participate? What is the extent of civil society engagementin literacy? Studies, databases and papers will make the outcomes of this research widely available.Community participation: strong community ownership of the purposes and processes of literacy will result in its effective use. This requiresgood communication between government and communities, inter-community networks, community learning centres and other ways of ensuringthat literacies are relevant and useful to people in their daily lives and serve their aspirations.Monitoring and evaluation: better literacy indicators are necessary to show what progress is made during the Decade, both in terms of literacyrates and numbers, and in terms of the impact of literacy. UNESCO will work with its institutes and its partners to find improved ways ofmeasuring literacy, in local contexts and worldwide.Who will be involved? A key feature of the Decade will be the prominent role which learners take in the design of literacy strategies for theirown situations. Standardised, one-size-fits-all literacy programmes have not on the whole been effective or led to sustainable literateenvironments. Other partners should participate in literacy promotion on the understanding that they will work in respectful ways with learnersand their communities, jointly negotiating strategies, methods and approaches. Community-based organisations, NGOs and civil society willprovide channels for collective action. Governments will have the responsibility to work closely with them, negotiating resource provision:training input, financial support, institutional recognition and validation. At the international level, the UN General Assembly asked UNESCO totake on the coordinating role, bringing partners together for joint action and policy debate. The whole of the UN system is implicated, each partpromoting literacy components within its own area of specialisation. International civil society networks have a responsibility both to sensitisetheir own members and to raise the awareness of governments and the general public about literacy.39