A man living in the dump turned a trained teacher to help his community children who spend their days collecting scraps and have never been to school to read and write.

A volunteer mother has been giving free lessons for ten years at an adult literacy school for women like her to be able to read books for their children.

A grandmother who can’t read her sons and daughters’ letters and was cheated by her community friends who are literate was encouraged to attend a literacy class.

A successful businesswoman who waited most of her life to become literate is finally fully proud of herself.

These stories were written as a prior-class assignment by participants from National Literacy Awareness Secretariat (NLAS) and Department of Education (DOE) and shared at the first-day web training under a topic of content management.

“People like to hear about what other people are doing,” Jim Pollard, a journalist at a local English newspaper in Thailand who was the trainer for day one of the workshop told the participants. “And I’d like to see the positive stories of good people doing good works in the website.

“The main thing is to get the introduction right. What do you think is the most important thing that you’d like to put in the beginning?” he said.

The seven government officers flew nine hours from their home country in Papua New Guinea to Thailand from 11 to 14 October 2011 to learn about necessary web-related skills in topics such as social media and video production, E-library and archives, web management and preparing images for the web to efficiently maintain their literacy website.

“This is a very good opportunity to tighten the relationship between UNESCO and PNG [Papua New Guinea] and we can learn about one another. This training will help improve our writing skills, and learn to upload and download for the website, and take good photos and take VDO footage.

“And you can learn a lot about our country,” said Maggie Maki Guria, a training officer of NLAS.

It’s the first time in history that all six of NLAS staff got invited to an overseas training altogether, but five attended as the head decided to man the office. The other two participants were from DOE.

The first PNG literacy website was developed in 2003 with support from the DOE. However, it was ceased one year after the launch due to funding constraints. In the absence of the literacy website as an effective information and communication tool, the important role of NLAS in coordinating literacy programmes throughout the country has not been functioning well, whereas the demand from literacy programmes providers and stakeholders has been consistently increased for NLAS to share information on literacy providers and programmes in the last few years.

NLAS is the main administration arm responsible for the coordination of literacy programmes in corresponding to the National Literacy Policy (NLP). The secretariat was established in 1985 and mandated the task of coordinating the NLP. However, due to a number of factors such as inadequate funding, lack of trained manpower, weak coordination mechanism and the absence of implementation plans, the NLP has not been implemented successfully and is overdue for a review.

“People of Papua New Guinea will benefit from the information that they will get from the website in different areas that cover literacy. If there’s new information regarding literacy, for example, new methods in training teachers, new learning materials for adults and young children, statistics of literacy and new publications, the people, and also partners and stakeholders both national and international will go into the website,” said Ms Guria.

UNESCO recognised that existing literacy efforts for many developing countries including PNG would not be enough to achieve a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, which is one of the goals agreed by the international community at the World Education Forum on Education for All (EFA) in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000. To address this situation, UNESCO created a ten-year framework of collaborative action – the Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE). This initiative is conceived as a global strategic framework and key operational mechanism for achieving the goals and purposes of the United Nations Literacy Decade (UNLD). As a priority, LIFE targets 35 of the world’s most challenged countries, where 85 per cent of the world’s population without literacy competencies live today.

PNG is listed as one of the 35 countries under UNESCO’s LIFE, which is aimed at improving the literacy profile of countries. In PNG, LIFE resulted in the launching of the CapEFA Programme August 2009. In fact PNG is the only Pacific Island country to be included in UNESCO’s CapEFA Programme.

The CapEFA project aims to help PNG to develop capacity of concerned staff of PNG to address the country’s literacy issues. Among the capacities that UNESCO will help to develop in PNG DOE staff are knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and dissemination. It is in this context that this four-day workshop was organized at UNESCO BKK. It would help PNG participants to create and develop an NFE website, upload news, materials, and case studies about literacy. It would also help participants to manage and enhance the website and help broaden the partnership in support of literacy.

“PNG is a country with abundant natural resources. However, the most important resource of the country is its people. The currently literacy rate of the people of PNG is not very high. To be truly resourceful PNG’s people need to be literate and attain higher levels of learning. People’s potential cannot be realized without good literacy skills. Nor can the labor force of a country be productive and competitive without good literacy skills,” said Abdul Hakeem, an education advisor and coordinator for Asia and Pacific Programme of Education for All, UNESCO Bangkok.

“UNESCO BKK has made available a number of resource persons including media and ICT experts at this workshop to assist the PNG participants in learning about website development. It is important for the participants to use this opportunity well. They need to also remember that the ultimate beneficiaries of the project should be the non-literate people who are to be assisted to learn to read and write through capacity development support from this project,” he said.

URL:  http://www.unescobkk.org/news/article/literacy-web-training-to-improve-lives-of-people-in-papua-new-guinea/

By Rojana Manowalailao, UNESCO Bangkok

however this site will remain live as a source of inspiration and resources for teachers of literacy until next year, when National Literacy and Numeracy Week 2011 is launched.