Education has been identified as one of the most important ways to achieve national development. With 3 million non-literate adults in Lagos State, the commercial nerve center of the nation, radio becomes a veritable medium to teach such adults who, for several reasons including economic, do not have the opportunity of formal schooling. The study…

The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) has launched a new publication, "Integrated Approaches to Literacy and Skills Development: Examples of Best Practice in Adult Learning Programmes." This new compilation showcases 21 adult education programmes that demonstrate promising approaches to integrating literacy, life skills and…

This article presents findings of study on women's experiences of Functional Adult Literacy (FAL) as a gateway to their financial progress and welfare in Lango region, Northern Uganda. The qualitative study of 45 participants aimed at examining women's live changes resulting from using their acquired FAL knowledge and skills to participate in…

The National Child Development Study is a longitudinal survey of all people who were born in the week of March 3-9, 1958 in England, Scotland, and Wales--approximately 17,000 people. A project used information collected from 12,500 of these people through interviews in 1981 when they were 23 years old. The project sought to determine (1) what…

The Building Capacities for Non formal Education and Life Skills Programmes project in Uganda was implemented by Uganda Youth Development Link (UYDEL) with financial and technical support from UNESCO--Section for Literacy and non Formal Education in 2004-05; aiming at assisting vulnerable and marginalised youth affected by HIV/AIDS and other risk…

A workshop on Literacy and the Right to Know discussed the problems of illiteracy on the job, especially in the context of teaching workers about job hazards. Participants approached the topic from a number of angles: the dimensions of the problem of literacy in workplaces; the impact of Right-to-Know legislation; the role of training and…

In most of the Arab world, the development of a national education system has been a recent process. Currently, one out of every two Arabs can neither read nor write. This paper focuses on how illiteracy has been dealt with in the country of Iraq. A 1947 survey put total illiteracy of those 15 years and older at 89.1%. In the period following the…

This collection of papers focuses on numeracy education for adults. In a paper entitled "Functional Numeracy," Terry Riley questions the underlying assumptions of functional numeracy and suggests that the term has often been distorted and oversimplified. Margeret Moss, in her paper "The Language of Numeracy," stresses that…

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was a collaborative effort by seven governments and three intergovernmental organizations to describe and compare the literacy skills of people from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each country drew a probability sample from which results…

This collection of papers focuses on literacy and the special educational needs of speakers of English as a second language (ESL). In a paper entitled "Ethnic Minority Educational Needs in the 1980s," Gurnam Heire examines some of the changes in employment and training that have taken place over the past few years and how these affect the…

This annotated bibliography lists 183 books dealing with adult literacy under 10 main categories: life skills; biographies; nonfiction; fiction; work identification workbooks; comprehension workbooks; skill development series; spelling workbooks; vocabulary workbooks; writing workbooks; and video programs. The categories are further subdivided…

Data drawn from 3 cycles of data collection for the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) were analyzed to identify the levels and distributions of literacy skills in the adult populations of 20 countries. The following were among the main conclusions: (1) in 14 of the countries, at least 15% of all adults have literacy skills at only the…

England's Learning and Skills Development Agency welcomes the introduction of a coherent national funding and delivery strategy for adult literacy, numeracy, and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The agency believes that the strategy should incorporate the lessons of previous literacy and numeracy initiatives and build on examples of…