Words of wisdom

WITH an estimated one billion people unable to read and write, adult illiteracy remains once of the most intractable problems of the developing world. Despite massive investment in education and literacy programmes, the methods used to teach the basics of language in the West have often proved inapplicable in the Third World.

Even textbooks can appear too "high-tech" for impoverished farmers who live a machine-free existence. For this reason, educators have been struggling to develop new teaching methods which are more relevant to the lives of people in the developing countries. Many of these build upon the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques drawn up by British development guru Robert Chambers, who was in Dublin last week.

Chambers "small is beautiful" ideas oppose the notion of development as modernisation, to be imposed by outside professionals. Instead, he maintains, solutions should come from the poor themselves, recognising that their communities have a wealth of technical and social knowledge which has often been ignored up to now.

This thinking coincides with that of many aid workers who have come to realise that low-tech, tried-and- tested approaches may be more productive than big-budget interventions. The Third World is littered with enough abandoned, multi-million pound projects.

One outcome of this thinking has been a new approach to adult literacy, REFLECT, which was launched by the development agency, Action Aid, in Dublin last week. The new system claims dramatic success in field trials carried out so far in Bangladesh and Uganda and is being extended to 25 other developing countries.

REFLECT - it stands for Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques - doesn't use textbooks. Instead people make up their own learning materials which are based on their own knowledge and are relevant to their lives.

According to David Archer, coauthor of the programme, the vast majority of literacy schemes in the developing world are struggling. In some cases the effectiveness rate can be as low as 12 per cent. "As a result, many donors have thrown up their hands in despair," he says.

REFLECT uses maps, calendars and diagrams about local farming, health care, work and other aspects of people's lives. A graphic - for example, a map or diagram - is first constructed on the ground using sticks, stones, beans and whatever else is easily available.

The graphic is then copied onto a large sheet and labelled using simple drawings. Thus, for example, a drawing of a house is used to show where housing is on a map, a calendar is developed to chart childhood illnesses, or a map is drawn to illustrate crop planting. By the end of a course, each learner will have copied a book a range of 30 graphics made by the class along with their own written phrases.

BETWEEN 60 and 70 per cent of those who enrolled in the pilot schemes ended up with a "consolidated level of literacy" upon which they could build, says Archer. "They also increased their participation in community organisations and came up with new forms of income generation."

In many cases learners ended up planning and carrying out improvements to their communities by, for example, planting trees or digging tube wells. Women learners use their increased confidence to take a greater place in household decisions.

Archer claims that participants on REFLECT courses are less likely to drop out because they see that literacy can make "a real difference" to their daily lives. As a result of this success, the authors are looking at ways of adapting the programme to teach reading, writing and arithmetic skills to classes in the developed countries.

According to Chambers, "when outsider professionals change their behaviour from being teachers to facilitators and hand over the stick, local people often show astonishing ability using their own methods, to map, model, list, score and diagram, and to analyse their own complex and diverse realities".

In his book, Whose Reality Counts? - Putting the First Last, Chambers argues that the central keys in development have been overlooked. "Myths have led to massive misallocation of funds and human resources, to misguided programmes, to missed opportunities and among professionals, to deception, cynicism and loss of commitment".