WHILE Jamaica has made steady progress in tackling adult illiteracy, the country has been “stuck” over the last decade.

In fact, with an estimated 89 per cent adult literacy rate, expert Dr Yewande Lewis-Fokum is suggesting that Jamaica considers turning to its better-performing Caribbean neighbours for pointers on moving the needle forward.

“A number of Caribbean countries are above where we are, with the exception of Haiti (62 per cent)… but they have their own particular challenge,” Dr Lewis-Fokum told the
Jamaica Observer ahead of International Literacy Day, which is being observed today. “Guyana is one percentage point above us, and I think that’s why I said we have a lot of work to do because we are kind of stuck at that 89 per cent for quite some time, and we need to move the needle.”

The literacy specialist, who is an English language and literacy lecturer at The University of the West Indies, Mona, told the Sunday Observer that with the country’s adult literacy rate being below that of Cuba (100 per cent), Barbados (100 per cent), Grenada (99 per cent), Trinidad and Tobago (98 per cent), and slightly below Guyana (90 per cent), Jamaica should probably find out what some of these countries have been doing to see what can be replicated to take the country beyond the high 80s into the 90s.

The 2015 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) statistics recorded Jamaica’s literacy rate at 88 per cent. Almost a decade later, while speaking at the Jamaica Teachers’ Association’s Education Conference in April this year, Minister of Education Fayval Williams spoke to the giant leaps made in education locally, and reported that Jamaica’s literacy rate is 88 per cent.

In 1999 the figure stood at an estimated 80 per cent, a vast improvement 29 years after a 1970 UNESCO survey showed that there was between 40 and 50 per cent adult illiteracy in Jamaica, which led to a national focus on the issue and the birth of Jamaican Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL), now Jamaican Foundation for Lifelong Learning (JFLL).

The adult literacy rate is the percentage of people, ages 15 and above, “who can both read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life”.

Speaking with the Sunday Observer on Friday, Dr Lewis-Fokum pointed out that, for centuries, Jamaicans did not receive formal education because the country is coming from a place where education was not provided for formerly enslaved Africans until 1835, by way of the Negro Education Grant. She also noted that the role of JAMAL must be recognised for having contributed to the improvement in the country’s literacy level, and the various governments which have funded different initiatives at the primary level with some success, which also translated to improved adult literacy.

While acknowledging that tackling adult literacy is a multi-pronged process, she highlighted two major problems: the sustainability of good projects and being language-aware.

“A project starts and it ends, as usual, because of funding, and then all of that improvement that you would’ve gotten from that particular project, in a sense, dies with the project. And that’s a pity,” The UWI lecturer reasoned. “So the question is: How do you go about sustaining something that is good?”

In relation to being language-aware, she said the question becomes: How do we train teachers and students to be language-aware?

“So, we need to take our two languages — Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English — into consideration in terms of literacy teaching. And then the other is, of course, teacher training — improved teacher training in terms of the teaching of reading, in particular,” she told the Sunday Observer.

Despite the challenges and seeming lack of movement over the last decade, Dr Lewis-Fokum gives Jamaica a passing grade for its effort at improving literacy.

“It is easier to blame than to applaud, and it is easier to blame than to put in the work to find solutions. There is a quote from a book chapter written by Professor Errol Miller that is helpful [here]: ‘Ironically, schooling in Jamaica is not credited for the level of functional literacy that exists within the society, but rather it is blamed for the level of functional illiteracy that persists.’

“Can we do better? Yes, certainly! We can improve the provision of quality education to our students most in need of better-resourced schools, highly qualified and better-paid teachers, in order to move that 89 per cent to 100 per cent,” she said.

Besides reaching out to Caribbean counterparts to assess what they have been doing, the literacy specialist also suggested other ways of improving the country’s adult literacy rate.

“Any improvement in the adult literacy rate must be a multi-pronged approach funded by successive governments over multiple years that is targeted,” she said. “Interventions, therefore, have to focus on current adults and also school-aged children.”

Pointing to the Jamaica Multiple Cluster Survey 2022: The Situation of Women and Children, she said there are major differences along lines of social class, gender, location, and the mother’s educational level when it comes to foundational reading skills.

“However, note that the largest gap in reading levels is between children from the richest (82 per cent) and poorest (47 per cent) households. As such, if we are going to improve the country’s adult literacy level we can do the following: Invest resources into educational institutions that cater to children coming from the poorest households; make reading attractive to boys; encourage unattached youth to return to one of the educational pathways; focus on rural areas; and target mothers with only a primary-level education,” said Dr Lewis-Fokum.

The theme for this year’s International Literacy Day celebration is, ‘Promoting multilingual education: Literacy for mutual understanding and peace’.