Rotary is committed to ending educational inequality and illiteracy throughout the world. Education fuels innovation and progress. That’s why Rotary members encourage lifelong learning: exchanging ideas and inspiring generations of problem solvers. Learning together to explore what’s possible – that’s what People of Action do.
In 2020-2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, most countries announced the temporary closure of schools, affecting more than 91 per cent of students worldwide. United Nations (UN) statistics showed that as early as April 2020, close to 1.6 billion children and youth were not in school.
The pandemic has reversed years of progress in education, and this is a stark reminder of the work needed if we are to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal Number 4, especially Target 4.6 – ‘To ensure that all youth and most adults achieve literacy and numeracy by 2030’. As a side effect to this, close to 369 million children who relied on school meals needed to look to other sources for daily nutrition.
Education can open so many doors of opportunity. If you live in a developed country, you probably started school at a young age and learnt to read and write. And even though those in developed countries may take education and literacy for granted, there is overall appreciation that these basic skills fuel innovation and progress, as well as, recognition that they are essential for reducing poverty, improving health, encouraging community and economic development, and promoting peace.
French poet, novelist, essayist and playwright Victor Hugo once said, “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” This is as true today as it ever was.
Unfortunately, even before the pandemic, not all countries had the luxury of literacy. In fact, 776 million people over the age of 15 are illiterate. That equates to 17 per cent of the world’s adult population. Of this 17 per cent, nearly two-thirds are female.
As for children, around 260 million were not in school in 2018. This represented one-fifth of the world’s population in the under-15 age group. Furthermore, more than half of all children and adolescents worldwide were not meeting minimum proficiency standards in reading and mathematics.
Illiteracy not only exists in developing countries, where poverty remains the primary cause of illiteracy, but also, in developed countries such as the United States.
In 1985, Rotary declared basic literacy a pre-condition to the development of peace. Today, Rotary clubs all over the world are taking action to improve basic education and literacy in their communities. Rotary supports education for all children and literacy for children and adults.
Making amazing things happen in learning
- Teacher in a Box (TIB): This project uses re-purposed laptops to provide offline access to educational and vocational videos stored in the system. In remote areas, a teacher can provide complete lessons to a classroom by connecting the TIB laptop with a projector and speakers. A mini router, which is included in the TIB kit, means that it can also be accessed by any Wi-Fi enabled device for self-paced learning. In short, the TIB server replaces the internet.
- Enhancing educational systems: In Kenya, Rotary clubs are working with the Global Partnership for Education and local and national governments to advance life-long learning opportunities for poor and marginalized children.
- Opening schools: In 2008, US-based Afghan native Razia Jan, of the Rotary Club of Duxbury, US, opened a K-12 school for girls in rural Afghanistan, bringing girls' education to the community for the very first time. Initially, locals advocated for Razia to change course, insisting she create a school for boys instead. But Razia remained steadfast in her intent. She recognized that the opposition she was encountering was a simple case of resisting the unfamiliar. Today, the community now sees the school's K-12 graduates as their primary source of household incomes, and its midwifery institute graduates as their primary providers of life-saving medical services. Graduates have gone on to build careers and pursue degrees at universities, successfully fracturing the cycles of poverty and illiteracy that have plagued their families for decades.
- Teaching adults to read: Rotary members in the US partnered with ProLiteracy Detroit to recruit and train tutors after a study showed that more than half of the local adult population was functionally illiterate.
- Butterfly Storybook: An annual story-writing contest run by the Rotary E-Club of the Caribbean. It is open to all children aged 7-11 in the Caribbean. The project promotes writing skills, shares the Caribbean culture, and provides literacy resources to schools in need.
- New teaching methods: The SOUNS program in South Africa, Puerto Rico and the United States teaches educators how to improve literacy by teaching children to recognize letters by sounds instead of names.
- Making schools healthy: Rotarians are providing clean, fresh water to every public school in Lebanon so students can be healthier and get a better education.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
Since 2009, Rotary has been working with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to promote early childhood reading. Dolly founded the library in 1995 as a means of helping children from low-income families who often start school at a disadvantage because they don’t have access to early childhood literature. Often these children are unfairly compared to their peers and are therefore not encouraged to pursue higher education.
Through the Imagination Library a child receives an age-appropriate book each month until age five. Rotary clubs throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland have been teaming up with Dolly to bring books to disadvantaged children in their local communities.
On March 1, 2018, Dolly donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of Coat of Many Colors dedicated to her father, who never learnt to read or write. Despite her father’s illiteracy, Dolly has often commented that he was one of the smartest people she had ever known regarding business and making a profit.
Further Rotary literacy programs
- The Rotary Reading Assistance Program (RRAP), which provides children aged 3-5 years living in drought-affected areas of Queensland with one reading book per month.
- The Free Reading Program, which began as a project of the Rotary Club of Scarborough, Canada, and now provides 3500 online activities to more than 300,000 students in 185 countries.
- The Literacy Rotarian Action Group (LITRAG), which is a committed network of Rotarians who provide resources and support for literacy and education projects.
Not even a pandemic can stop us
As these examples demonstrate, Rotarians do not let something like a pandemic set them back. In the past 21 months we have been learning together to explore what’s possible, and we have seen the benefits of remote learning.
Through programs such as TIB and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, we are ensuring that education never stops, and illiteracy is eliminated.
As American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said: “Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.”