NGOs Key Partners in Overcoming Illiteracy
Non-governmental actors, alongside the government, are essential to support the many illiterate women and men in Iraq in their efforts to learn reading and writing. UNESCO has recently launched an initiative to strengthen the capacity of NGOs to fully harness their potential to reduce Iraq’s illiteracy rate that is estimated at 20% with half of the illiterate people being young women in rural areas. To develop capacity to enhance the cooperation and coordination between concerned parties, four capacity building workshops were held in Erbil during November and December 2014 for members of the NGO community, representatives of the Executive Board of the High Commission for Eradication of Illiteracy and staff of the Non-Formal Education Department of the Ministry of Education of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
“The workshop was very important to me. I now better understand the role that NGOs can play in combating illiteracy and how all parties can more efficiently cooperate,” commented one of the participants.
NGOs play an important role in the field of education. Their contribution to increase educational opportunities in Iraq, in particular non-formal education needs to be harnessed and further invested in.
The initiative to develop legal and technical frameworks for educational authorities to more efficiently partner with national NGOs is part of the project “Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE)” project that UNESCO implements in partnership with Education Above All Foundation. Its overall aim is to reduce the illiteracy rate in Iraq by 50% in 2015, one of the global goals of ‘Education for All’. Within the framework of the LIFE project, UNESCO assisted the Iraqi government in the formulation of the National Literacy Strategy and other operational plans.