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Unions have marked International Literacy Day with a series of global events. EI participated in the Centre for Universal Education and International Reading Association’s launch of a study into early reading which calls for urgent support of assessments and instruction.

The event was organised by the Brookings Institute and IRA and was held in Washington D.C., USA, with an international audience of educators and trade union officials, and explored the findings of RTI International’s Early Reading: Igniting Education for All report highlighted the critical necessity of acquiring reading skills in early years of schooling, and chronicles the crisis of quality of education in low-income countries by drawing on the evidence from of early years’ reading assessments conducted in nearly 50 countries.

The theme of International Literacy Day 2010, which has been celebrated on 8 September since 1965, was ‘Literacy and women's empowerment’ so it was fitting that EI Vice President and General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers, Irene Duncan-Adanusa, was joined by EI’s founding President, Mary Hatwood Futrell, of George Washington University, among a distinguished group of participants who took part in the discussions. Others included representatives of teachers’ unions from the USA, including the AFT and NEA, as well as the Jamaican Association of Teachers, and other stakeholders.

UNESCO’s Director-General, Irina Bokova, stressed in her message for the Day, “investing in women’s literacy carries very high returns: it improves livelihoods, leads to better child and maternal health, and favours girls’ access to education. In short newly literate women have a positive ripple effect on all development indicators. This international day aims to mobilise everyone’s attention to the urgent need for increased commitment to literacy, especially for girls and women.”

While women’s empowerment is at the core of the global development agenda, girls still account for more than half of the 67.4 million out-of-school children in the world, and two-thirds of the 796 million illiterate adults are female.

UNESCO has launched a Knowledge and Innovations Network for Literacy that will enable researchers and practitioners all over the world to link up and share information and best practices. The annual International Literacy Prize awards ceremony and a roundtable on Literacy and Women’s Empowerment were also held at UNESCO’s headquarters in Geneva.

EI’s Africa Chief Regional Coordinator and Chairwoman of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) board, Assibi Napoe, reminded colleagues that: “Literacy is essential for the development of active citizenship, improved health and livelihoods and gender equality, however it remains one of the most neglected Education For All Goals.

“In some countries in Africa more than 80 percent of the population is illiterate, mostly women. Illiteracy is a violation of human rights. We have the knowledge and tools to change this, so it is a travesty that literacy rates are not rising faster,” she added.

The GCE, of which EI is a founding member, warned that “according to UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report published in February 2010, on current trends the literacy goal will be missed by a large margin in 2015, with an estimated 710 million adults remaining illiterate worldwide.”

EI continues to calls on its member organisations and all concerned citizens to act in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.