Literacy on the home front.

• Position: Six national campaigns

Xu Weizhi is a fruit farmer at his home in China's Sichuan Province. In 1982, he was also one of China's almost 238 million illiterate people over the age of 12. Like Weizhi, 91 per cent of his country's illiterates live in rural communities; the other 9 per cent live in cities.

In China's anti-illiteracy drives and rural education programmes, more than 17 technical schools have been established to teach farmers to read and write, as well as strategic agricultural skills.

Weizhi attended one such school and applied the cultivation techniques he had learned for growing fruit. The new techniques not only improved Weizhi's peach harvest but also significantly increased his income.

Xu Weizhi's story is not an isolated one. Since the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, more than 153 million people have become literate. Massive anti-illiteracy efforts, combined with developments in education, reduced the illiteracy rate from 80 per cent in the 1950s to 34.5 per cent today.

Carrying its success into the 1990s, China will launch a new literacy campaign during International Literacy Year. It will be designed to reach 80 million illiterates and reduce the rate of illiteracy to about 10 per cent. Previous anti-illiteracy programmes have won UNESCO awards for outstanding achievement in eliminating illiteracy.

As in China, the driving force behind many government literacy efforts is prompted by revolution. Political objectives of a new government often focus on mobilizing the masses for nation-building and development, the need for a national language to facilitate communications, and abolishing class feelings between rural and urban people.

Political change: A driving force

Mass literacy campaigns are one way to achieve such goals.

When the Government of Somalia took power in 1969, literacy became its number one objective.

In order to create a dialogue between the new Government and the people, first an official language had to be adopted. Traditionally, Arabic had been used in a religious and cultural context; state business was conducted in English and Italian. Somali was the language of daily conversation.

The Government decided that the unwritten Somali language should become the official tongue, choosing Latin script for the written version. Immediate action was taken to teach reading and writing in Somali to Somali citizens.

Overcoming language differences

The United Republic of Tanzania is another example of a developing country...