By 2015, the international community pledged to reduce adult illiteracy rates by 50% compared to 2000 levels as part of the Education for All (EFA) goals. While the number of illiterate people has fallen over the past 15 years, UIS [UNESCO Institute of Statistics] data show that 757 million adults still lack basic reading and writing skills . . . Two out of three illiterate people are women — one generation after another.
—from the latest UN report on literacy
I was unable to save the names and numbers of contacts on my phone before taking the literacy course because I couldn’t read or write, but now I am very happy because I can save them without asking anyone else for help.
—from one of the 62 Kurdish women who recently graduated from a three-month, UN-sponsored literacy program
September 8th is the fiftieth anniversary of International Literacy Day. The first quotation above indicates that, after a half century, one of the UN’s primary goals when the institution was founded in 1945 remains elusive. The second quotation indicates the sort of progress that is being made — other women in the same Kurdish group expressing hope that they can now get a job, drive a car, read about world events, and break the cycle into which they and theirs were born: “I am now able to help my children practice reading and writing during their summer holidays to prepare them for the new school year.”
In A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offer case studies of initiatives in literacy and other fields of social change that have proven worthwhile, instructive, and inspiring. At the organizational level, for example, Kristof and WuDunn highlight the exemplary success of John Wood’s “Room to Read” program. As Wood describes in his Leaving Microsoft to Change the World and Creating Room to Read, he went from being a high-flying business executive with a wild, one-off plan — getting his friends to donate books so that he could take them, on the backs of yaks, to a remote Nepalese village — to being the founder of an organization that, over the last eighteen years, has distributed over 10 million books and constructed over 1,500 schools in needy regions. One of Kristof and WuDunn’s individual success stories describes the transformation of the orphaned South Sudanese refugee Paul Lorem from unschooled refugee to Yale graduate, literate in five languages. Putting his degree in economics to use, Lorem now heads Tanuru Farms, a company offering help and opportunity to small-scale growers in Kenya.
Having begun his education by sitting under a shade tree forming letters and numbers in the dust with his finger, Lorem could serve as poster child for Adam Braun’s The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change. While a student studying under a Semester at Sea program, Braun travelled widely; at each stop, he and his classmates collected souvenirs — Braun’s eventually inspiring his literacy mission:
Some saved shot glasses with the names of cities etched on them in local languages. Others bought a hat or saved a beer bottle. A few took pictures of Beanie Babies in front of famous landmarks . . . Before I got on the ship, I had decided that I would ask one child per country, “If you could have anything in the world, what would you want most?”
The answer “a pencil” propelled Braun to found the “for-purpose” organization — he feels that “nonprofit” is an unhelpful negative — Pencils of Promise, which now builds schools and trains teachers worldwide.
The aha! moment that inspired Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of the venture philanthropy firm Acumen Fund, came while jogging the hills of Kigali, Rwanda. In The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, Novogratz describes looking up from her run to see, among the banana-laden women and playing children, and as Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” played on her Walkman, a small emaciated boy wearing a blue sweater — her blue sweater she confirmed, donated to a Virginia charity a decade earlier, her name still on the label.
Novogratz attributes the success of her Acumen Fund — over fifteen years it has invested almost $100 million in “patient capital” in India and Africa — to those she was able to help and who in turn helped her:
It is from them that I gained the confidence and sense of possibility that sustained me. They allowed me to believe we could — and therefore must — create a world in which every person on the planet has access to the resources needed to shape their own lives. For this is where dignity starts. Not only for the very poor, but for all of us.
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Sig Nordal 