 | Recovery of Kabul Town afterthe war. |
UN-HABITAT and USAID have joined forces in a new drive to improve Afghanistan’s literacy rate, which after years of conflict is one of the lowest in the world.
The USD 40 million project called the Learning for Community Empowerment Programme, is looking to address literacy and numeracy skills in a country where, in rural areas, 90 percent of women and 63 percent of men cannot read or write. Afghanistan’s population has almost no accumulated assets or resources to enable them to take the first steps out of poverty. To date, no strategy has addressed these inter-related concerns: the lack of literacy and numeracy skills, productive skills, and an approach to savings and investment on a wide scale. The goal of the empowerment programme is to contribute to community economic empowerment through an education programme that integrates literacy and numeracy education, productive skills and business development skills training, and establishment of self help groups for savings and investment. The project is to be implemented in 2,766 rural and 2,766 urban communities in 20 provinces across Afghanistan, with UN-HABITAT providing support to the National Literacy Centre, Ministry of Education, during this process. A total of 312,000 older youth and adults will benefit from the programme of which 60 percent will be women. The project will provide support to establish and train National Literacy Centre staff at the district, provincial and national level for the support, management, and oversight of the program, while new learning materials will be developed corresponding to the needs identified by rural communities. For further details click here. |
