Literacy and Livelihoods:
Learning for Life in a Changing World
Presented at:
International Experts Meeting
15-17 November 2004
Opening remarks by:
Sir John Daniel
President & CEO
Commonwealth of Learning
Greetings
It is my great pleasure, on behalf of the Commonwealth of Learning, to welcome you to Vancouver. Thank you for helping us define our new programme in Literacy and Livelihoods and base it on firm conceptual and practical foundations. Together you make up a fine and representative sample of the Commonwealth expertise and I am grateful to the representatives of national governments and international organisations who have joined us too.
I express special thanks to the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, and the UK's Department for International Development, DfID, which have supported this work with special financial assistance. I am sure you will also allow me offer particularly warm greetings to my former close colleague from UNESCO, Qian Tang. I hope that you will all feel very much at home during your time in this very multi-ethnic and multi-cultural city of Vancouver.
My task, in these opening remarks, is to do four things. First, I shall situate COL and explain what it is and what it is not. Second, I shall explain how this new work on literacy and livelihoods fits into our wider programme. Third, simply to provide a starting point for the discussions, I shall risk some general comments on literacy, on livelihoods and on the relationship between them. Finally I shall re-emphasise the mission of COL.
What is the Commonwealth of Learning?
What is the Commonwealth of Learning? I start with the Commonwealth, or Commonwealth of Nations, which is a voluntary association of 53 sovereign states. The conditions of membership are to be democratic, to have a historic link with Britain or with part of the former British Empire, and to accept the use of English as the working language in Commonwealth meetings.
These criteria create common links between Commonwealth countries that help them work together. Three 'Ls': law, language and learning, are particularly useful in this bonding. Similarities of legal principles, constitutional arrangements and educational traditions make communication and understanding easy.
The Commonwealth has three intergovernmental bodies: the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, which is our equivalent, on a much smaller scale, of UN headquarters in New York; the Commonwealth Foundation, also in London; and the Commonwealth of Learning, based here in Vancouver. COL is the only Commonwealth organisation, either intergovernmental or NGO, that is not based in the UK. It is also the only intergovernmental organisation of any kind to have been created in Canada. It happened when the Commonwealth Heads of Government met here in Vancouver in 1987 in this very hotel.
COL's mission has a tight focus, which is to help the member states use technology to increase the scope, scale, quality and impact of their education and training systems. We have a special focus on open and distance learning, or ODL, because it is an application of technology that has shown its power and value in many countries and for many applications.
To put that more formally our mission statement says: "Recognising knowledge as key to cultural, social and economic development, The Commonwealth of Learning is committed to assisting Commonwealth member governments to take full advantage of open, distance and technology-mediated learning strategies to provide increased and equitable access to education and training for all their citizens."
Having just come to COL from UNESCO, I naturally make comparisons between the two. COL differs from UNESCO in its sharp focus on technology-mediated learning rather than on the whole of education, culture and science. It serves only 53 member states instead of 192. All 53 are democratic, nearly all are at peace, and most are developing countries. A special feature is that two-thirds of the Commonwealth countries are small states, either islands or landlocked territories. Finally, COL is tiny compared to UNESCO. We have a total of 35 staff in Vancouver, and a handful more in CEMCA, our Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia in New Delhi.
All these features make it possible for COL to act effectively, efficiently and rapidly in response to requests from Member States and in implementing our ongoing programme.
How does a programme on literacy and livelihoods fit in?
That will suffice as a short description of COL as an organisation. How does this work on literacy and livelihoods fit into our wider programme?
Like many international intergovernmental organisations, COL has been moving from a project focus to a programme focus and implementing that programme according to the principles of results-based management. Our present three-year programme, for 2003-2006, is aimed at helping Member States develop policies, systems and applications for the use of technology generally, and ODL in particular, across their education and training systems broadly defined.
However, that is a rather bureaucratic definition. Another way of looking at the programme is to say that we help countries apply technology and ODL to the learning needs that lie behind their development goals. Most of our programme links directly to the Millennium Development Goals. You will have received a brochure that presents our work on each of those goals.
Our motivating principle is that the achievement of any one of the MDGs, whether it addresses, hunger, poverty, schooling, health or the environment, will require a massive increase in human learning. In most cases traditional methods of providing opportunities to learn cannot cope with the scale and scope of the challenge. That is where technology-mediated learning can help and COL can help.
COL has already had some involvement in literacy work. Indeed, your chief facilitator, Glen Farrell, coordinated our most recent project in this area, which explored the use of ICTs for advancing literacy in India and Zambia. We learned some useful lessons in that project that I shall touch on in a moment.
We have also worked in the area of livelihoods, most especially through a focus on technical and vocational education and training in the Commonwealth's Pacific island states. That programme was very ably run by John Bartram and is being continued by Jenny Williams, who is on full-time secondment to COL from the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand.
Reviewing all this work, as we prepare a new three-year plan, led us to the idea of bringing together literacy and livelihoods in one programme. Let me emphasise right away that we see this new programme as evolving in an organic way from our previous work. We are not kicking over the traces and starting afresh.
COL does feel, however, that its sharp focus could enable it to blend literacy and livelihoods into a programme of action. This would be more difficult for larger organisations, whose missions are more abstract. At UNESCO, for example, literacy has a section all to itself that has the task of organising the UN Literacy Decade. It has another section, located in another division, which focuses on TVET.
COL does not see this initiative as competing with the work of others and we benefit from the specialised work of UNESCO and other organisations. The question that COL asks is much simpler. Can we use technology-mediated learning to increase literacy and, at the same time, to improve livelihoods? If the answer is yes, what are the policies, systems and applications that we can recommend to governments to achieve this?
Please note that we are not promoting technology-mediated learning for its own sake. We promote it because experience shows clearly that by using technology generally, and distance learning in particular, two important results can be achieved.
First, it is capable of reaching marginalised and under-represented groups, whether their barriers to learning are social, political or geographical. Second, distance education can be conducted at scale with consistency. We can widen access to learning and raise its quality at the same time. This explains the powerful potential of distance learning in the achievement of the MDGs.
Linking literacy and livelihoods
In proceeding down this path it is important that COL starts with the right baggage and a good map. In this third part of my opening remarks I shall hazard some comments about the link between literacy and livelihoods. My aim is to contribute to the debate at this experts meeting that will clarify the principles on which we should base our work.
I begin with a caveat. A problem in thinking about literacy is that all those who write about literacy are, by definition, literate themselves. This makes it difficult for them to see life from the perspective of someone who is not literate. It is also true that those who write about livelihoods usually have a decent livelihood themselves. None of this need limit the value of what they have to say, but some humility is in order as we generalise about people who do not enjoy our own advantages.
Being a simple man I shall examine the issues of literacy and livelihoods in terms of two dichotomies. I start with literacy.
Literacy
The dichotomy in promoting literacy can be presented in various ways but they boil down to a simple question: is literacy education or is literacy development? It seems like a silly question. Literacy is clearly education. Indeed, it is the most important product of basic education. Treating literacy as education gives rise to a short and crisp definition of a literate person as someone who can, with understanding, both read and write a short simple statement on his or her everyday life.
But literacy is also development. Ten days ago I attended a ceremony in Bangalore where the President of India made one of his wise and insightful speeches. He quoted statistics from the district of Pondicherry, which showed that as rural communities became more literate their birth rate went down and the amount of land under cultivation around the community went up. Fewer people farming more land clearly means improved livelihoods in that community.
I make a distinction between literacy as education and literacy as development because, when we seek to bring literacy to adults, how we go about it will depend on which emphasis we chose.
If literacy is education then schooling for adults is the obvious approach. This makes possible good organisation, a national curriculum and good learning materials. However, since even children see school as somewhat isolated from the rest of life, so adults can easily find literacy as schooling isolated from their daily concerns.
This is less of a problem if we start from literacy as development and root it in the social and economic development of the community. This leads us to the notion of functional literacy which has a more convoluted official definition: a person is functionally literate who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for the effective functioning of his or her group and community and also for enabling him or her to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his or her own and the community's development.
This definition implies that the acquisition of functional literacy will be better integrated into ordinary life. However, simply because such an approach means starting from the bottom up rather than from the top down, it does not lend itself so readily to organisation and economies of scale.
COLLIT
In recent years, quite by chance, COL had a chance to try both approaches in India side by side. This was our COLLIT project, which was coordinated by Glen Farrell and guided by Dr Balasubramanian, whom I am delighted to welcome to this meeting.
COLLIT worked through the government systems to teach literacy as education in a number of communities. However, bureaucratic delays prevented us expanding the work as fast as we wished. So we worked in some additional communities with the M.S.Swaminathan Research Foundation, which was using ICTs for development in those communities without teaching literacy. The Foundation used its ICT base in the communities to create a bottom-up approach to literacy based on the personal experience of individuals.
The interesting and reassuring observation from these two approaches was that they did tend to converge. Some of those who became literate through the methods used by the Foundation then sought formal recognition from the state system. Conversely, the more conventional top-down approach to literacy education tends to lead gradually to an emphasis on functional literacy and to discover the usefulness of community-based learning centres. We drew several conclusions from this COLLIT project.
First, to be useful literacy must be used. Second, the impact of literacy was greater for those who could link it to their livelihood. Third, literacy is a great generator of self-esteem and confidence.
Livelihoods
In the matter of livelihoods I have observed a dichotomy that generated palpable tension - not all of it creative - when I was at UNESCO. It arises when you ask people what they mean by life skills. One school of thought takes life skills to mean a generic set of skills for living in society. These are skills such as teamwork, problem-solving, communicating, networking, negotiation, and so on. Because of their importance throughout life they are sometimes treated as a fourth component of literacy after reading, writing and numeracy.
The other school of thought considers that life skills are more directly connected to daily life in the context of a particular individual. These are sometimes called contextual skills and they include livelihood or vocational skills, skills for family life, health skills and skills related to the environment.
Although the respective partisans of generic skills and contextual skills can argue vehemently with each other, in the real world contextual skills do not exist in isolation from generic and literacy skills. A farmer needs the practical skills of growing crops and fixing broken machinery but also requires the generic skill of negotiation to sell her produce at a good price and the literacy skill of numeracy to ensure that she is not being defrauded by the buyer.
This suggests that contextual skills should be acquired in ways that link them with these other skills. We can then talk of composite skills for different purposes. However, these are sometimes wrapped up in terms like health literacy, agricultural literacy, family literacy and so on. I do not find such terms helpful because they tend to undervalue the common denominator of skills involved in reading and writing: skills that are of special importance because their applicability to a wider variety of situations makes them basic tools for life.
I conclude that while it is best to help people acquire generic skills, contextual skills and literacy skills in combination, it is useful to keep the distinctions clear in our own minds.
Here let me enter a caveat. No amount of training in life and livelihood skills will create good livelihoods without some kind of functioning economy. We must support improvements of the infrastructures that underpin economic life and also, as C.K.Prahalad argues persuasively, encourage big business to stop ignoring the poor and bring them into the market economy instead. In COL's programme of Lifelong Learning for Farmers in India, for example, getting the banks more deeply involved in the villages is part of our strategy. Dr Balasubramanian will be pleased, I am sure, to tell you more about it.
My final point on livelihoods is another caveat. Livelihoods are about doing, but let us not forget the importance of being. Amartya Sen argues that freedom is both the measure and the means of development, by which he means that it is people acting as free agents who make development happen.
We must not get so carried away by a utilitarian approach to literacy and livelihoods that we neglect the human spirit, what Sen talks of as 'the freedom to talk and act about what one values'. The vital freedom to hold values may get lost if we focus too narrowly on the practical applications of literacy.
All this suggests that promoting literacy for livelihoods must be sensitive to context and environment and take an appropriate approach. In our programme of Lifelong Learning for Farmers in India, for example, we know how the individual villagers try to make a livelihood and can target COL's work appropriately. However, in our attempts to combine literacy and livelihood training for male school dropouts in the Caribbean, it is less clear what livelihoods we are shooting for. We need a shotgun rather than a rifle.
COL's Mission: the appropriate use of technology
I hope that these brief remarks on literacy, on livelihoods and on the link between them help to set the scene for our discussions. I end by re-emphasising COL's interest in this area.
The task before you is not to contribute to the ongoing theoretical debate about literacy and livelihoods. Neither it is to review good practice in literacy acquisition except as it illuminates the challenge facing COL, which is to use technology to scale up such good practice and reach many more people.
At COL we interpret technology widely. It covers ways of approaching problems as well as gadgets that plug into the wall. We define technology as the application of scientific and other organized knowledge to practical tasks by organizations consisting of people and machines.
I emphasise two parts of this definition. First, we are not engaged in a futile search for the perfect method of learning. We are applying 'scientific and other organised knowledge'. That can mean tacit knowledge, crafts and organisational experience, not to mention a good dose of common sense. Second, we are living in a world of people and machines. Good use of technology always involves people and their social systems.
COL's task is to get greater leverage on the challenge of preparing people for life in a changing world by using technology intelligently. We shall do this by bringing together our organised knowledge and by being very sensitive to the social systems in which we are operating.
We are not starting from scratch and we now have an array of technologies at our disposal. The approach that I called literacy as education has benefited in many places from the use of the mass media. In Pakistan, for example, the Allama Iqbal Open University has backed national literacy campaigns with well-produced printed literacy materials that benefited from the investment made possible by economies of scale. Other countries have used the mass medium of television for a similar purpose.
The great thing about the mass media is that they reach the masses. You might say that the great thing about today's new technology, the Internet, is that it is a one-to-one and group-to-group medium. In this respect it seems particularly appropriate for supporting literacy as development. I mentioned the remarkable development work that the Swaminathan Foundation is doing in Indian villages using Internet kiosks and village IT centres.
Earlier I suggested that the approaches to literacy as education and literacy as development tend, in the end, to converge. In a similar way I hope that COL's work in literacy and livelihoods can draw on both the mass technologies and the one-to-one technologies. Both are important and both can contribute.
The challenge before you in the next few days is to advise us how we might combine the potential of technologies with what we know about literacy and livelihoods to achieve impact at scale. The fundamental purpose, let us remember, is to reduce poverty and hunger through such interventions.
Conclusion
That sounds like a tall order but you have been highly recommended for the task. In your various ways you have contributed to reducing the scourge of illiteracy and to helping your fellow human beings to enjoy better lives. In your work you have learned many lessons. COL presents you with the opportunity to use technology to apply those lessons at scale so that others can learn.
Achieving the MDGs will require a massive expansion of human learning. Traditional methods of education and training cannot address the scope and scale of the task. Technology has already revolutionised other areas of human life and we must now harness it to the improvement of livelihoods through the acquisition of literacy.
Thank you.
