THEME: Functional literacy can empower poor rural women.

According to an IFAD study under the Gender Strengthening Programme for Eastern and Southern Africa, done in 2000, illiteracy in Uganda is 55.1% among women, compared with 36.5% among men. Usually, in rural areas the gap is larger and literacy rates are lower. As elsewhere, functional adult literacy programmes in Uganda involve other useful learning besides reading, writing and numeracy skills. Functional literacy may indeed be a powerful tool for empowering poor rural women, particularly if they can apply their new learning and skills. A comparison between the experiences under the IFAD-supported Hoima/Kibasale and the Uganda Women’s Efforts to Save Orphans (UWESO) projects suggests that linking functional literacy training to credit helps enhance women’s control over income. Experience also shows that men’s illiteracy can restrict women’s chances of literacy.

Fully 80% of attendants at functional literacy classes conducted in Hoima, Masindi and Kibaale were female. The study found that women viewed functional adult literacy classes as playing an important role in their empowerment and in reducing their ignorance and poverty. When asked, they noted a number of benefits. These included reading, writing and numeracy skills and other useful knowledge and skills acquired. Such commonly acquired learning or skills included: how to control pest crops; how to improve sanitation and hygiene at the household level (use of rubbish pits, boiling water, use of latrines); the care and nutrition of children (breastfeeding, a balanced diet, immunization); and modern farming methods. The study concluded that functional literacy had given women both useful learning and self-confidence.

Basic numeracy is particularly useful for women in managing their agricultural and off-farm enterprises, more so when credit and savings are involved. However, the study noted that even when women acquired such skills, they often still felt uncomfortable keeping their accounts and tended to rely on men for this. This pattern was found among some women-only group enterprises and at the family level. For instance, all the culvert-making groups in Masindi had included some men to help them with the accounting, the purchase of raw materials and other heavy tasks.

The study also found that when husbands were themselves illiterate, they tended to discourage their wives from attending literacy classes. The wives said that illiterate husbands were threatened by the idea of their wives’ learning to read and write when they themselves could not. Men are willing to allow attendance as long as their wives’ skills do not exceed their own. Alternately, they are afraid that they will lose control at the family level. So why do these men not sign up for classes themselves? According to the study, men who are illiterate sometimes pretend to be literate out of shame and the fear of losing status in the eyes of other villagers. However, some women suggested that if functional adult literacy classes were presented as business training, they would attract more unashamed men.

This experience argues for the value of functional literacy for poor rural adults in general and women in particular. But it also presents a circular problem: illiterate women often cannot attend functional literacy classes because their husbands are illiterate, and the illiterate husbands do not attend because they are afraid of losing their status in the village. The study wisely suggests that one solution might be to ‘disguise’ literacy classes as business training, to make them more socially acceptable to men, thus also removing a constraint on their wives’ learning.

Adapted from:

FAO. 2000. IFAD’s Gender Strengthening Programme for East and Southern Africa – Uganda Field Diagnostic Study (Draft). Rome.