nformation can be readily preserved, processed, and conveyed across
time and space. They also serve to record thought and activity, nurture
expression and communicative ability among their users, and provide
a source of empowerment that can bring about great change in society.
There are, however, some one billion adults in the world who are illiterate,
or unable to read or write at all. Between them and the literate population
there exists a giant gap in knowledge and information. Two thirds of the
world's illiterate persons are concentrated in Asia, a region where population
continues to grow. Seventy percent of the world's illiterate are women
and children in the developing countries of Asia and Africa, and those
numbers are increasing, especially among women. This bodes ill for the
world of the future. Although it is women in villages and rural areas of
Asia who are primarily responsible for the essentials of food/clothing/shelter,
rearing and education of children, production of goods, and other
economic affairs of life, for them the doors of educational opportunity
are closed.
As individuals, our minds are in everyday life constantly occupied with
addressing problems and issues that we can readily perceive, and for
which we can by our own means identify and apply quick and concrete
remedies. The same can be said for the world of politics and economics.
In the larger context, though, we may note that major breakdowns in
societies worldwide are in any era brought on by neglect or abandonment
of education that imparts not only knowledge but also understanding
and compassion.
In times of intense change such as the present, if people are unable to
read and write and thereby unable to acquire knowledge and information,
their very survival will be endangered. The human being for mental and
spiritual health requires the nourishment of knowledge and information.
People cry out for the fulfillment that these bring, just as the body
requires gratification of physical hunger.
What would humankind be, what type of history and civilization would
have been built, were it not for the invention of written characters?
The collective memory of the human race and important details of the
individual's predecessors are passed down in the form of written materials.
Without written language, the complex problems of today ? poverty,
human rights and other social issues; AIDS, genetic engineering and
other health issues; limited natural resources, global warming and other
environmental issues - could not be taken up, nor could the inner
frontiers of psychology and outer frontiers of space be investigated.
For 24 years dating from 1977, I was involved fulltime in book development
and literacy concerns with the UNESCO activities in Asia and the Pacific.
There we undertook a wide variety of projects in response to needs in the
respective countries of the region, including cooperative publishing schemes
to develop reading materials for children, training courses
to nurture editors and authors in the publishing process, co-production of
literacy education materials, workshops to train personnel in literacy education,
and holding of the Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustration.
All of these projects were carried out with the cooperation of experts
from UNESCO Member States in Asia and the Pacific.
In the course of this work, I visited many Asian and Pacific countries,
and was particularly struck by the extremely difficult environment for
education and publishing in Pakistan. Therefore, I felt led to place myself
on location there and attempt to make a contribution through working
at the grassroots level. Fortunately for me, the opportunity arose in 1997,
when I was dispatched to Pakistan by JICA as the first literacy specialist
from for Islamabad to take up my assignment as advisor to the Prime
Minister's Literacy Commission of the Government of Pakistan
.
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