Closing the gender gap: literacy for women and girls.

• Position: Includes related information on UNESCO in Nepal and Burkina Faso

When you educate a mother, you educate a nation.

-proverb

Thirty-three-year-old Binta Badji felt an urgent "need" to learn to read and write after being unable to take notes or read class handouts during a three-day training course for village women on food processing. This motivated the Senegalese mother of two to join 60 other women in a literacy class. They were taught how to read and write in their native languages and to do simple arithmetic.

Sajjeda Begum is one of the few female administrators of a ration shop in the Dakshinpuri section of New Delhi. The 49-year-old mother of five, whose husband is unemployed due to ill health, was functionally illiterate until the age of 35 when she enrolled in a yearlong literacy course which also taught her basic accounting. Not only was she able to obtain her present job, she and other newly-literate friends became social activists, lobbying for clean drinking water, sanitation, drainage, hygiene and garbage collection in their working-class suburb.

Binta and Sajjeda are literacy success stories. UNESCO estimates that some two thirds of the estimated 965 million adult illiterates-637 million-are female. UNESCO also says that nearly half of the women in developing countries do not know how to read or write. While one of every, five men in the world is illiterate, as many as one third of all women cannot read and write. In some predominately rural countries, more than 90 per cent of women are illiterate.

UNESCO Director-General Federico Mayor says lack of advancement in the education of women and girls is "the heart of the problem of illiteracy". He calls women "the mothers of a literate society".

Female illiteracy is expected to be one of the focal points of International Literacy Year. Governments will be asked to target illiterate and functionally illiterate women and girls in education programmes. Women and development

Educated women are a vital component of development efforts, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In the report, Safeguarding the Future., UNFPA Executive Director, Dr. Nafis Sadik-a female medical doctor from Pakistan-writes: "In every country studied, researchers have discovered a close connection between the level of mothers' education and the size of their families." Educated women are also "more likely to protect their children's health", she says, adding that "for every year of mothers' education, child mortality is reduced 7 to 9 per cent".

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