CHAPTER FOUR: The history and context of literacy and adult literacy education in Uganda
4.4 Government adult literacy education programmes
4.4.2.3 Post-colonial government adult literacy education work
In this section, I discuss the role of post-colonial government in the provision of adult literacy education programmes. As with the discussion of policy above, I divide this discussion into two. The first section deals with the earlier post-colonial government efforts in the provision of adult literacy education. The second section deals with the current organisation of adult literacy education programmes.
4.4.2.3.1 Previous post-colonial government adult literacy education efforts
After independence, the new post-colonial Government of Uganda continued with the organisation of adult literacy education programmes. The Government joined other African governments in their call to uplift the standard of education amongst their
23 Obote I refers to the first time Dr. Milton Obote was prime minister and later president of Uganda from 1962 to 1971 when Idi Amin overthrew him from office.
citizens. This call was a collective resolution made in 196124 by all African Heads of State in Addis Ababa. The aim of this resolution was to secure universal literacy by 1980 to enable the promotion of social and economic development in Africa.
In response to this Addis Ababa resolution, the government of Uganda launched a mass literacy campaign covering the whole country in 1964. This literacy campaign covered 22 languages, with primers and follow up readers written in those languages. During the 1992 National Learning Needs Assessment Survey that was done to launch the 1992 Functional Adult Literacy education programme, some people who participated in the 1964 adult literacy education campaign programme as teachers, administrators and learners, were asked to give their view of the programme. The finding was that many people benefited from the programme and were able to learn how to read and write their names and some simple statements, including doing some simple calculations.
Although the link between the fall in the level of illiteracy registered in late 1960s and early 1970s and the literacy campaign of 1964 was not established through systematic research, there was a noticeable decline of 10 per cent in the level of illiteracy in the country following the launch of that programme. Furthermore, most of the people who participated in it as either learners, teachers, or administrators generally had good memories about the effect of the programme (see Okech, 2006).
In 1966, UNESCO attempted to introduce the idea of Functional Literacy into the programme that has been started in 1964. This attempt failed because the learning materials had already been developed based on the non-functional ideas of teaching literacy that emphasized learning the skills of reading and writing without reference to any purpose for using the skills as envisaged in the functional literacy approach. The materials could not therefore support the use of the functional approach to teaching adult literacy that was now being proposed by UNESCO. Discarding the already developed materials was seen as a waste of the resources that had already been committed to developing those materials in use in the 1964 programme before the idea of functional literacy was proposed. For many reasons, by 1970, this adult literacy programme had almost collapsed. In 1973, the government of Idi Amin, which came to power after overthrowing the government of Milton Obote, tried to revive the failing programme without much success. Among the many reasons for the failure of this programme was the use of force and untrained teachers including primary school children. After the complete collapse of the programme launched in 1964, there was no other attempt to organise
24 Uganda got its independence from the British imperial government on October, 9. 1962. This was after the 1961 Addis Ababa resolution.
another adult literacy education programme in Uganda until the 1980s (See, Baryayebwa, 1998, 2004; Carr-Hill et al., 2001; Okech, 2004; Okech et. al, 1999; Openjuru, 2002, 2004b; Sentumbwe, 2001).
In the 1980s, African governments who had come together in Addis Ababa in 1961 realised that universal literacy had not been achieved as planned in 1961. From this realisation, African governments again recommitted themselves to eradicating illiteracy by the year 2000. This commitment was made at a meeting held in Harare in 1982. In response to this Harare commitment, the government of Uganda again attempted, with support from UNESCO, to revive the provision of adult literacy programmes during the early 1980s. A National Intersectoral Committee was set up to plan for the
implementation of an adult literacy programme in the country. This committee was not effective in fulfilling its mandate due to lack of financial support from the government and political instability that was experienced in the country during the early 1980s (see Carr-Hill et al., 2001; Okech, 1994, 2004; Okech et. al, 1999; Openjuru, 2004b).
In 1992, motivated by the World Conference on Education for All (EFA) held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, and the United Nations Assembly’s declaration of the 1990s as the International literacy decade, the government of Uganda initiated another literacy programme with support from UNESCO, UNICEF, and The Institute for International Co-operation of the German Adult Education Association (IIZ-DVV) (Openjuru, 2004b;
Sandhaas & Asnake, 2003). The new programme was initially called the Integrated Non- Formal Basic Education Pilot Project (INFOBEPP). This project started in eight districts, one in each region of the country. In 1996, it was renamed the National Functional Adult Literacy (FAL) Programme and rolled out over many years to cover the remaining districts in Uganda. By 2004, it was in all the 56 districts of Uganda (Busingye, 2005;
Carr-Hill et al., 2001).
4.4.2.3.2 Present adult literacy education provision
Presently, adult literacy education is the responsibility of the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MoGLSD), which is responsible for organising the programme at the national level. At the district level, the Chief Administrative Officer and the Community Development Officers are responsible for implementation. Below this structure are the FAL co-ordinators who operate at different levels from Sub-County to parish level (Busingye, 2005; Ministry of Gender Labour and Social development, 2003).
In describing the implementation of FAL in Uganda, Babikwa (2004, p. 43) says, “The government-run Functional Adult Literacy programmes (FAL)… in Uganda have, for
example, often been developed following an expert-led technocratic centre to periphery model” of planning. This planning model excludes the target community from
participating in planning the literacy programme. This observation is not consistent with the actual process followed by the MoGLSD. This process involves conducting Learning Needs Assessments (LNAs). The information collected during the LNA is then used to develop adult literacy education curricula and materials for teaching literacy. After a period of implementation, the programmes are evaluated. The literacy facilitators are recruited from amongst the local communities through local leaders of the areas where the programmes are organised, and to which the selected adult literacy facilitators are posted to work after their one-week training in methods for facilitating adult literacy classes.
However, the way LNAs are conducted (See Bhola, 1979, pp.77-93) does not enable information to be obtained about the local literacy practices of the communities for whom literacy programmes are developed. For example, LNAs target and focus on obtaining information on the learning needs of those who are not literate. The literate members of these communities are not part of this process because they are considered to be outside the target group for adult literacy education programmes.
Furthermore, in the process of organising LNAs, the non-literate people are seen as people who do not interact with text in their everyday lives. For that reason, the LNA does not focus on getting information on how they are involved with text in their everyday lives. However, the literature review in Chapter Two shows that research on community literacies in other parts of the world reveals that non-literate people also interact with print in their everyday lives in a number of ways, like through using their social networks and employing personally developed print managing strategies (Barton &
Hamilton, 1998; Klassen, 1991). In Uganda too, texts are an unavoidable part of human life for most people regardless of their ability to read and write. Yet literacy programmes are not developed with the input of the non-literate people in the community. For this and other reasons25, non-literate people have been found to keep away from such adult literacy programmes (Carr-Hill et al., 2001; Okech et. al, 1999; Oxenham, 2001).
Confirming this distorted view of rural literacy, during literacy programme evaluations, the focus of the evaluators was often on literacy practices involving reading materials such as magazines, newspapers and textbooks. For example, a 1999 World Bank evaluation of adult literacy programmes conducted in Uganda was looking for such activities as evidence of the use of the skill of reading and writing by the graduates of the
25 See Klassen (1991, pp. 44, 51–56) for a detailed discussion of the other reasons that discourage non- literate people without previous school experience from participating in adult literacy programs.
adult literacy programmes they were evaluating. These materials, while they are important as reading materials, are often written in a language and style that make them inaccessible to an adult beginner reader26 who has just completed learning how to read and write. Secondly, most of the materials deal with subjects that are not of immediate interest to adult beginner readers. The reading of road signs, labels, and notices was described as circumstantial reading (Carr-Hill et al., 2001; Okech et. al, 1999). Yet according to the literature review, this is the reading and writing people do in their everyday lives (see Barton & Ivanič, 1991).
LNA findings also reveal that they are designed to collect other equally important information like the poverty and development needs of the community, which are not immediately related to how reading and writing is used in the community. For example, a literacy LNA study conducted by MoGLSD, “Revealed that poverty is a priority concern among adult learners" (Ministry of Gender Labour and Social development, 2003, p. 4).
This was obviously not an expression of a literacy need but rather an economic
development need. This conflation of literacy and development is a long-standing source of problems for both development and adult literacy workers, and an area of a long running debate in adult literacy circles (Openjuru, 2004a). It shows that literacy is in most cases not the primary focus in LNAs. Instead, it is the social and economic development needs of the communities that are the focus. The outcome of such processes is an adult literacy education programme that is not related to the literacy practices of the local communities for whom the programmes are being designed.
In the end, literacy programmes for rural people tend to be designed without any knowledge of how rural people actually use literacy in their everyday lives. This is not a denial of the important role literacy can play in the development of poor rural
communities, but rather I am questioning how literacy programmes are conceived and implemented without recourse to the local uses of reading and writing and the condition and activities of the people for whom the programmes are to be designed (Openjuru, 2004a). Because of these problems, programmes based on such approaches to LNA and other forms of survey, often fail to capture the real literacy practices of rural people or their real literacy needs. As a result, not much is achieved in terms of improving the local literacy practices of rural people, or solving the problems of rural poverty which adult literacy education programmes are designed to address (Okech et. al, 1999). A new way
26 This term was defined by Lyster (2003, p. 3) as denoting “adults with very basic literacy skills”. Other terms commonly used in the literature are: neo-literates and newly literate adults.
of approaching the organisation of literacy programmes for rural people needs to be investigated.