CARACAS: Venezuela has declared itself an illiteracy-free territory, announcing that 1.482 million adults have learned to read and write in the past two years, and that less than two per cent of the population of 26 million remains illiterate. “We are no longer poor, we are rich in knowledge,” 70-year-old María Eugenia Túa, who signed up in the Mission Robinson literacy programme two years ago, proclaimed in Congress.
Túa spoke in the ceremony in which the government declared this South American oil-producing country free of illiteracy, in a session attended only by the legislators of the ruling coalition, which holds a majority in Congress.
“It is practically impossible to achieve a 100 per cent literacy rate, there is always a small percentage of people we simply cannot reach, but we will not lower our guard,” said Education Minister Aristóbulo Istúriz, standing next to his Cuban counterpart Luis Gómez. Cuba provided the “Yo sí puedo” (Yes, I can) teaching method created by Cuban educator Leonela Realy, and sent instructors who trained 129,000 Venezuelan literacy tutors.
With that contingent, the government launched its literacy campaign in July 2003 with the aim of teaching one and a half million adults to read and write, and set up a programme offering incentives to those who agreed to attend classes, ranging from baskets of staple foods to land and credit, as well as 100,000 grants of 75 dollars a month, half of the official minimum legal wage.
The people who have benefited from the literacy campaign include 70,000 indigenous people in dozens of communities, who are now literate in both Spanish and their own indigenous languages. Special programmes were also undertaken for the blind and deaf, and for 2,000 prisoners — 10 per cent of the country’s prison population — while people with poor vision visited the ophthalmologist for free and more than 200,000 contact lenses were prescribed without charge.
At a ceremony attended by President Hugo Chávez on Friday, a blind elderly woman gave a demonstration of how she had learned to read using Braille. Mission Robinson II went into effect several months later, to enable the newly literate adults to complete primary school, and other plans were implemented later to allow hundreds of thousands of people to complete their secondary school education or enter university, with the help of monthly scholarships or grants.
The programme took its name from the pseudonym used by Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854), aka Samuel Robinson, South American independence hero Simón Bolívar’s teacher and mentor. Because Rodríguez was born on Oct 28, that was the date chosen to proclaim the end of illiteracy in Venezuela in the ceremony in Congress.
Istúriz said the goal achieved by Venezuela is certified by the Andrés Bello educational agreement among the Andean countries, and by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). Unesco special envoy María Luisa Jáuregui said “we visited the classrooms and centres used in the literacy campaign in Venezuela, and it is only fair to recognise the political will and efforts made to teach one and a half million people to read and write.”
Unesco supports Venezuela’s literacy goal, she said, adding that “Venezuela is the first and only country to meet the commitments adopted by the region’s governments in 2002 in Havana to drastically reduce illiteracy.” Although Latin America in general has achieved universal primary education and several countries have literacy rates higher than 90 per cent, Unesco estimates that 39 million adults are still illiterate in the region. The most drastic case is Haiti, noted Jáuregui, where half of the adult population is illiterate.
