Literacy Outshines Everything Else

UNESCO’s International Literacy Day is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and the banner says "Reading the Past, Writing the Future". Clearly, the motto is to ensure that we learn from our past achievements and failures and carve a promising future in the quality of education and literacy rates.

When UNESCO had proclaimed September 8 as International Literacy Day 50 years ago, it had set out its focus on the eradication of illiteracy by mobilising various channels, organisations and communities. Today, it’s indeed a large community of like-minded individuals and organisations that are working together for facilitating education for children and adults. The day will also mark the awarding of International Literacy Prizes in order to honour people who have outstanding solutions towards achieving the 2030 Education Agenda. UNESCO has begun to implement the 2030 Education agenda for the illiteracy eradication that aims at "achieving literacy and numeracy to all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women." At Akshaya Patra, we couldn’t be more excited than now since we work with the motto of "food for education" in order to reach out to the unreached children of India with food and education.

As UNESCO launches its new agenda on education, our government continues to work towards enhancing the quality of children’s education. Many studies report that in India many children do not attend school since they have to take care of domestic chores at home as their parents fetch bread and butter every day. However, it’s more worrying that a major portion of population does not think it necessary to pursue education.

The education system in India still suffers from high school drop-out rates. The data from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) had revealed last year that 13 out of every 100 Indians between 5-29 years did not attend school or dropped out because they did not consider education necessary. As an NGO for children, Akshaya Patra encourages dialogue and interaction with decision makers within families of children and makes them aware about the importance of education. We do wish to eliminate one crucial factor of hunger that deprives children of education yet we recognise that our efforts need to go beyond this.

We realised that the proportion of kids who don’t attend school due to financial constraints or domestic chores was higher between 10-14 years. This was the same demographic that also considered education unnecessary. With our Mid-Day Meal Programme, we intended to uproot the above two major factors of dropping out. As a result, many parents were persuaded to send all their kids to school since they knew that the school was taking care of one of their meals. Many remote government schools noticed a dip in the school drop-out rate with visible change in the admissions. One such example is the Zilla Parishad School in T K Pura near Hyderabad, which today educates 103 students. The students became regular while the enrollment rate went up by 2%.

How are we making a difference?

While we know that much needs to improve in the education system in India, we also believe that this system is capable enough to make children aware about the world and their surroundings apart from empowering them with literacy.

The year 2016 has been better for the government in terms of decreasing the number of school drop-outs. Many states have made progress towards this. A recent government report states that Odisha had made significant progress in reducing school dropout rates from 18.72% in 2012-13 to 6.02% in 2015-16. It’s extremely encouraging because we have been working in Odisha for many years as an NGO for children and providing mid-day meals in schools.

On International Literacy Day, you have the opportunity of joining the Education Agenda 2030 along with Akshaya Patra. We need more children and more adults who know how to read and write. Education is such a tool that can equip people to face any challenge in life while illiteracy often disrupts their progress.

You can make a difference too by a small charity donation. As we celebrate the completion of 2 billion meals, we strive to involve more people towards the cause of food for education.