Launching the possible dream.

• Position: International Literacy Year

Filling out a form, understanding a prescription, obeying a traffic sign or helping children with homework can be anxiety-ridden experiences for over one quarter of the world's adult population-the estimated 965 million people over 15-who cannot read or write.

But there is hope now. Millions may soon be able to lead fuller lives thanks to a massive, United Nations-backed effort to reduce global illiteracy. The decadelong campaign, spearheaded by the launching of International Literacy Year (ILY) in 1990 may well signal the beginning of the end of the long night of illiteracy throughout the world.

Good news accompanied the launching of the Year on 6 December 1989 at UN Headquarters in New York: for the first time, it was reported, the absolute number of illiterates in the world had begun to decline.

"The rate of illiteracy in the adult population has declined from an estimated 40 per cent in 1960 to 28 per cent in 1990", announced Federico Mayor, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the lead agency for UN anti-illiteracy efforts. He said that if this trend persists, "the number of adult illiterates will fall by 23 million between now and the end of the century". Due to a growing world population, this number had increased in past years.

UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who officially launched the Year, called illiteracy "a major concern" of the world Organization. For nearly 1 billion women and men-the illiterate adults of the world-the "right to education proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not yet a reality", he said.

What ILY is about The aims of the Year are "to boost literacy efforts around the world and to put literacy high up on the development agenda," said Colin N. Power, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education. More than 80 national committees have been formed to carry out the work of ILY.

According to UNESCO, the Year's main objective is to set in motion a world-wide movement for literacy as part of a 10-year Plan of Action (1990-1999). Mr. Mayor explains: "The message of International Literacy Year, then, is that education matters and matters greatly. Literacy is the vehicle of education-the means through which ideas, information, knowledge an wisdom are expressed and exchanged.'

The Plan of Action is based on regional programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Africa, in Asia and the Pacific, and in Arab...