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Literacy & the future
| The Education for All report advocates a three-pronged strategy to the acquisition literacy: (a) Quality schooling for all children (b) Scaling up of literacy programmes for youth and adults and (c) Development of environments conducive to the meaningful use of literacy. In Africa, South African President Thabo Mbeki, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, and Algerian President Abdelazis Bouteflika worked on the Millennium African Renaissance Programme (MAP) to ensure that the future of African development is designed by Africans. The G8 Summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, has endorsed the African recovery plan. The Map accepts the need for good governance, political stability and democracy and human rights. Particularly, the action plan includes: 1. Strengthening of mechanisms for preventing and coping with conflicts 2. Promoting democracy, human rights, participation and good governance 3. Strengthening education and public health services, particularly with regard to HIV/AIDS 4. Ensuring macroeconomic stability 5. Introduction of transparent legal frameworks for finance markets 6. Development of agriculture, especially with regard to processing 7. Promotion of human resources and infrastructures Literacy, in today's culture of print, is the only door to all other forms of education. It is a connection with the past and a bridge to the future. Ironically, to save unwritten mother tongue languages, they must be committed to writing, and oral heritage and indigenous knowledge must be coded in writing to renew it and to preserve it. Literacy obviously connects us with our futures which will not be oral by. Formal primary education, secondary and vocational education, higher education is impossible without first acquiring basic literacy. Nor is it possible without literacy to teach knowledge, attitudes and skills that are subsumed under non-formal education. Functional literacy (with its focus typically on economic functions), civic literacy (with its interest in political education), adult basic education, adult basic education and training, adult continuing education, all must teach literacy to make their learners, self learning independent learners. |
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