Conmany Wesseh Pays Tribute to Literacy Trainers in Liberia
Kirkpatrick Weah
THE POWER OF LITERACY, ESPECIALLY
WOMEN’S LITERACY IN LIBERIA
A KEYNOTE ADDRESS by CONMANY B. WESSEH
Ambassador of Liberia to the European Union and the Benelux Countries
on the Occasion of the 44th Anniversary of the International Literacy Day
organized by National Adult Education Association of Liberia (NAEAL)
in collaboration with The Ministry of Education of Liberia
At the David N. Howell YMCA Building, Broad Street, Monrovia
Wednesday, 8 September, 2010 at 10a.m
KEYNOTE ADDRESS by Ambassador Conmany B. Wesseh
Dr. Martor Kpankpai, Deputy Minister of Education for Instructions;
Other Officials of the Ministry and of the Government generally;
Mrs. Yah Kailan, Head of the UNESCO Office in Liberia; and Mr. Saydee of UNESCO;
My dear friends of the National Adult Education Association of Liberia;
Adult learning practitioners and learners;
Ladies and gentlemen;
Dear friends:
Appreciation
I wish to profoundly thank the National Adult Education Association of Liberia (NAEAL) in collaboration with the Ministry of Education for organizing these celebrations marking the 44th Anniversary of International Literacy Day and for inviting me to do the Keynote Address. I want to particularly thank my friends and fellow literacy workers of NAEAL, Executive Director Roye B. Bloh, Jr, Stanley Bedell and others, and the forever literacy man Paye Nuhan, Director of the Adult Literacy Division, Ministry of Education for their work for a literate society.
Why the Acceptance of Invitation
Let me confess that I accepted the honored invitation with two aims: one, to use the occasion to pay a belated tribute to the many friends of mine and yours who died in the service of a literate Liberia. I am speaking of J. Gouloh Jensen, who served so well and so long as Executive Director of NAEAL and others like him who, in the early 1980s, were condemned by the then illiterate-to-semi-literate military rulers for daring to become literacy teachers. The initiative of Dr. HB Fahnbulleh, then Minister of Education, to train literacy teachers in Ethiopia was interpreted as an effort to train armed fighters for the
eventual overthrow of the military government. This was one clear example of how much anti-democratic regimes fear an educated and informed citizenry. In spite of this, Jensen, Siapha Kamara (currently a renowned international development theoretician and practitioner) and other men and women dedicated themselves to the transformative need to take Paypaye, the Grebo word for “light”, to communities and the whole nation. I saw them at work; I worked with them; and I heard them. May we rise for a minute of silence in tribute to those literacy Heroes and Heroines who were not as lucky as Siapha to survive the tortures and harassments that took some lives. Thank you.
The second reason for my acceptance of the invitation is because I believe in adult literacy, especially in what the theme of this 44th Anniversary of International Literacy Day: “The Power of Women Literacy” conveys.
Although my NAEAL friends have asked that my message should center around “how effectively literate women can contribute to the national growth and development of Liberia…”, I have chosen to do so by also commenting on a couple of other related matters of education in post conflict Liberia.
Definition of Literacy and the background to the celebration
Considering what literacy means from one society to another, let
me advance the commonly accepted traditional description that literacy is the ability to “read and write”, a concept defined by different theoretical fields.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) define literacy as the “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate, with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individual to achieve their goals to develop their knowledge and potentials and to participate fully in their Community and the wider society.”
With this definition in mind, UNESCO, on November 17, 1965 proclaimed September 8, each year as International Literacy Day, with the first celebration taking place in 1966. We are informed that the aim of the day is to highlight the importance of Literacy to individuals, communities and societies. It is said that there is
a cause to celebrate because there are about 4 billion literate people. However, literacy for all – children, youth and adult, totally more than 780 million is still unaccomplished. Two-thirds of this total are women and 94 – 115 million children lack access to education.
While the importance of education is generally acknowledged in Liberia, since the founding of the country, 163 years ago, we are faced with the grim truth that the Literacy statistics, unreliable or confusing as they may be, expose the gap between what we say and what we do for the enlightenment of society.
According to yet unconfirmed calculations done by the Adult Education Division of the Ministry of Education based on the 2008 National Housing and Population Census Final Results, Liberia’s literacy rate is about 44.69%, say 45%. This means that 55% of the population is illiterate. Until the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-information Services (LISGIS), the official
Government statistics office, proclaim its figures, we will continue in the confusion as we now see on the most approximate data. Of course the most widely quoted figure is that Liberia is more than 70% illiterate. What all agree on is the suggestion that more than two thirds of the illiterates are women.
As high as this is, we might want to pat ourselves on the back if we see the UNESCO “Global Monitoring Report on Education for All (2008) which says that South and West Asia has the lowest regional adult literacy rate of 58.6%, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa of 59.7%, and the Arab States 62.7%. In the same report, the world’s lowest literacy countries are Burkina Faso (12.8%), Niger
(14.4%) and Mali (19%). But Liberia, at 163, is a far cry from the vast majority of the countries in the world and Africa. Cuba leading many developed countries is at 99.8%; and Seychelles and Zimbabwe leads Africa at 91.9% and 91.2% respectively; while Cape Verde (83.8%) and Nigeria (72%) and Ghana (65%) lead West Africa (UNDP Report 2009 relying on UNESCO Institute of Statistics April 2007 Assessment).
The Reports show a clear connection between illiteracy and countries in severe poverty and between illiteracy and prejudice against women.
In our recent history, we can say that our low literate population impacted our country very negatively in many ways. While time will not permit me to provide empirical evidence to the definitive statements that I will make, I take it that many need no convincing in agreeing with me.
1. Illiteracy is a threat to democracy;
2. Illiteracy undermines the making of wise choices in the selection of leaders and development priorities;
3. Illiteracy makes Liberians vulnerable to charlatan and demagogues who exploit the legitimate grievances of the people to create chaos and even violent conflict to pursue their personal and too often criminal agendas;
4. Illiteracy contributed to a large measure to the level of destruction and prolongation of the 14 years war; and
5. Illiteracy contributes to poverty generally, undermines manpower development and promotes unemployment.
A highly Literate society must therefore be the goal of Liberia. The entire family must be targeted to build a properly functioning society.
But considering the very skewed nature of the Liberian literacy curve against women and considering the very critical role women play in the family, an exceptional attention must be paid to women and girls education. An educated and literate woman:
a. Accelerates a family’s cohesion and reduction of its poverty;
b. A literate women increases the chances for employment by self or by others;
c. A literate woman can improve her own or family income generation and
management there reducing poverty;
d. A literate woman adds quality to the life of the family; and
e. Helps rear good children and good citizens.
Integrity in Education
Permit me to use this occasion to comment on the matter of the mass failure of our children in the West African Examination Certificate (WAEC) last year and this year. I believe that the failures are a direct result of the reported pervasiveness of academic fraud and generally low integrity in our schools, the school system, and the higher educational institutions. The integrity problem originating from the home, gets consolidated in our schools and colleges/universities and matures in the the workplaces. It is this integrity deficiency that we call chronic corruption everywhere. It has complete cycles that that resist treatment and appears incurable.
To simplify the nature of the corruption cycle, let me take the hypothetical case of a girl child named Juah.
Juah’s parents get her through primary and elementary school through bribing of teachers and school administrators. Juah in high school meets a teacher who solicits bribes in material, financial or other forms for grades. Juah fails the WAEC. Juah finds her way through fraud in one of our colleges or universities. She buys her way through college, graduating Suma Cum Laude. Juah goes in the greater society bribing her way into the classroom to teach kids for the WAEC.
What do you expect her to do? I would expect an unqualified fraudulent teacher who will have nothing good to teach but extortion from students, passing them in the same way she went through. Such a person only poisons the minds of the children for he/she generally is incompetent and corrupt.
I believe that it is now time to prosecute academic fraud as a crime. It is time to withdraw degrees granted individuals found to have defrauded an institution and got out into society. I believe that teachers should be protected from corrupting students. Defrauding students should be strongly subjected to stiff disciplinary measures. Failing to act against these two, we will be nourishing the seeds of corruption that is so pervasive in society.
In this regard, I challenge Dr. Emmett Dennis and colleagues at the University of Liberia, my alma mater to lead the way in fighting academic fraud in our universities. The public will fully stand behind them for any drastic measure to deal with a chronic disease.
The University must help fight mediocrity and be part of a national movement for literacy where we properly educate the whole family, provide literacy lessons to families in need, especially women and girls, our daughters, our mothers and our sisters with the values of integrity. This will be preparing our society to be a better place.
I am happy that as we are rebuilding our country after war, as we are attracting huge investments, our government is making education a major part of the agreements. I wish to acknowledge that Firestone, although belated, is putting education on the front burner. I am happy to hear that one of our early literacy trainers in the person of George Caine is one of the senior officials in the new Firestone education drive. Mr. Caine was one of those who studied as literacy teachers in Ethiopia and who went on to do graduate work in Germany. He is now working with others in Firestone making the Firestone school
system to be among the best in the country, if the output from the WAEC is anything to go by. With this progress, we are sure that the cyclical poverty in Firestone will become the thing of the past. With these schools, a rubber tapper will no longer born a tapper. A plantation worker must not be condemned to only having children that would grow up into plantation workers. Firestone must teach the new palm plantations springing up that Liberians would like their children to grow up as scientists, engineers, doctors, manufacturers, inventors and social thinkers. It is only by this that our status as a poor third world country will change to a truly developing and eventual developed country.
I close these remarks by once again thanking the organizers of these celebrations for inviting me to join you all in magnifying the voices calling for increased support to education generally and girls and women education by all – the government, the private sector and civil society. Indeed, there is power in women literacy and therefore it must be a national policy and action.
God bless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!