"Knowledge is Power" national literacy campaign
Howaida Kamel, Cairo Community Manager
One of the biggest problems faced by those living in poverty in Egypt is illiteracy. Government figures estimate that there are 17 million Egyptians who cannot read and write, the majority of whom are females concentrated in Upper Egypt and the Greater Cairo Region (GCR). In late 2011, the Vodafone Egypt Foundation partnered with the Life Makers Association and UNESCO under a joint campaign titled "Knowledge is Power." The campaign aims to eliminate illiteracy in Egypt by 2017 by providing classes that teach basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills in nine different governorates.
The "Knowledge is Power" campaign is a unique model in that it effectively uses the different capacities of corporate actors, civil society organizations, international institutions, as well as public institutions and various other non-governmental and community-based organizations in order to achieve development goals. The Vodafone Foundation has pledged to finance the campaign for five years. The Life Makers Association facilitates the implementation on the ground and provides training for volunteers in the associated NGOs and CBOs. UNESCO has contributed with the curriculum development and the advanced syllabi, which also includes new technologies such as Java, Android, and iOS. The campaign is approved by the National Authority for Literacy and Adult Education and the Ministry of Education, and the public support assists the campaign in achieving its goals. Last but not least, there are 20 associated NGOs and CBOs in the nine governorates that provide the classes and reach out to illiterate people in their respective communities.
The coordinated efforts of all these institutions is a crucial factor in the upscaling of the literacy classes in order to reach out to the 17 million target individuals. Annual targets were set for the number of volunteers recruited and projected outreach; below is a table of the annual targets for the first three years of the campaign.
The project hopes to achieve exponential growth each year so that as the number of volunteers increases, the number of people educated will increase as well. The campaign has made astonishing progress, successfully training 8,000 volunteers and enlisting a total of 30,000 volunteers. The surplus in volunteers is indicative of the amount of support the literacy campaign has from the community of development practitioners in Cairo and throughout Egypt.
As of late Spring 2013, the "Knowledge is Power" classes have registered 127,315 illiterate people, of whom 92,416 have passed the program's primary literacy exam designed by the Life Makers Association. While these numbers don't necessarily match up to the target numbers, there is an extremely high success rate of those who continue to the end of the program to pass the exam. However, only about one-third of those who complete the program have successfully passed the official Ministry of Education's literacy exam.
In the transition period that Egypt is currently facing, it is important that corporate actors and other institutions take initiatives towards national development goals. The government is no longer capable of being solely responsible. The Vodafone Egypt Foundation views illiteracy as one of the major problems in Egyptian society, especially in the context of the country's transformation towards democracy. Vodafone Egypt CEO, Hatem Dawidar, summed it up quite well: "Through literacy we are accomplishing two things, development and democracy."
Photo credit: Vodafone Egypt Foundation