>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Lauryn Oates: Hi, everyone.
It's a tremendous privilege to
be here, I've already learned
so much and the day
isn't even half over.
So, I'm from Canada, I
don't know if you can tell
from the name of
our organization,
which is Canadian Women
for Women in Afghanistan,
a little bit of a mouthful.
And also, that we say
about properly in Canada,
we'll teach you Americans
to do that one day.
So, the program I'm
here to present
on is called Afghanistan
Lowalee!
Which means Afghanistan
reads in Pashto,
and it's an adult literacy
program that has been
in about 10 provinces so far in
Afghanistan out of 34 provinces.
And it really came about
from the observation
of literacy programs
in Afghanistan,
which are fairly ubiquitous.
It's a country with one of
the lowest literacy rates
in the world, and there's been
a real drive to addressing
that from the Afghan government
and the donor community,
and from Afghans themselves.
But there hasn't been as much
progress as there should be.
And one of the indicators
that tells us this is a survey
from UNICEF in 2011 found
that, even of women,
adult women who had some
primary school educations,
so from anywhere
from grade one --
from one grade up
to sixth grades,
29% of them were illiterate.
And this was tested
by the surveyor,
they were asked to
read a sentence.
So, we don't know if that
means that they had literacy
and they lost it, or that they
never actually gained literacy
despite having gone to school.
And in my own evaluations
and observations
of literacy programs, we see
typically, the approach is
to run a literacy
class for a year,
and maybe the students
can do well
on testing immediately
after the class.
But, if you find them six
months later or a year later,
they're not functionally
literate.
So, we -- we're asking
ourselves, why is this?
And we suspected that
the answer might be
that there were no books
in the literacy classes.
There were the textbooks
for literacy,
but these were textbooks
meant for grade one kids,
and adults were being
asked to read them.
So, we thought, hmm, maybe
there should be books
in a literacy program?
So, I'll get right into the
program, but I just wanted
to mention, our organization
has been around since 1996,
we are a volunteer drive
organization in Canada.
We have chapters in a
dozen cities in Canada,
and a country office
in Kabul, Afghanistan,
and regional offices
around the country.
And our goals are two-fold, one,
to improve the status of women
and girls, and we see education
as key to the empowerment
of women and girls
in Afghanistan.
And secondly, to raise
awareness about the struggle
for human rights in
Afghanistan among women
and girls among Canadians.
So, we have three programs,
we work in the basic
education system trying
to strengthen the education
system for grades 1 to 12.
And then, we also
have a program,
which is where Afghanistan
Reads!
falls into, the Community
Libraries and Literacy program
that serves the out
of school population,
or people who are aged 15 plus.
We also actually
teach men and boys,
as well as women and girls.
And our third program is
Technology for Education.
So, in Afghanistan Reads!,
once we figured out this lack
of book issue as being the
problem, and hypothesized
that people were not
actually really having fun
in literacy classes.
That it was a very hard and
dry task when you've never been
to school in your whole life.
And as an adult, a hard-working
person, a lot of the women
in our programs are farmers.
They have a lot on their plate,
and you come to a classroom,
and you've got to go through
this drudgery of learning,
and it's just not something --
you don't really want to come
home at the end of the day
and read your dry textbook.
So, we wanted to make it more
engaging and fun, and relevant
to their lives, and to really
build a love for reading,
and hope that this
would transmit actually
into the family.
So, how we decided to do that is
to combine the literacy
classes with libraries.
So, we made the literacy
teacher a librarian,
we'd give them a training
in literacy pedagogy,
but also in basic librarianship
and reading promotion.
And we put mini-libraries
in the classrooms.
And the classrooms
are home-based,
so we have 20 students
in a class.
We pay a little bit of money to
a local woman in the village,
and use her living
room as the class,
so it's very cheap for us.
And they get a library, and the
teacher goes through a program
where they learn how
to encourage the
students to borrow books.
And they take them home,
and they do a whole series
of reading promotion
activities as part of the class.
And we do a few other
things as well
that we think are
a bit different
than other programs
in the country.
We do life skills, so we
integrate things like nutrition
and health, and hygiene in
with the literacy curriculum,
as well as livelihoods.
So, in our communities that's
mainly rural livelihoods,
so farming and agribusiness.
And then, the fifth
element is the transitions.
We want these women to go
on to further opportunity.
Whether that's enrolling
in public school
and making their way
through the grades,
or going into a vocational
training program.
So, currently, we have about
a 21% rate of women going
on to other opportunities.
So, this is sort of the program
of how we do the
reading promotion,
so we have reading consultants
work with the teachers,
and help them pick activities
that are suitable
for their classrooms.
And we call it the
Literacy Activities Menu,
has 25 activities
they can choose from.
And the reading consultant
goes back to the community over
and over again to see how the
teacher is doing implementing
those activities, and doing
both mentoring and monitoring.
So, I'm happy to share that menu
with you if you're interested.
So, I'll end here, and I invite
you to check our website.
We have a short video describing
the program there more.
And we also have a separate
website called Darakhat-e-
Danesh, Knowledge Tree,
which is our digital library
for educators in Afghanistan.
And it has a whole
range of subjects,
but we have a collection
on literacy education.
And that digital library is in
Dari ,and Pashto, and English.
So, the English speakers
will be able
to find some useful stuff too,
and it's all openly licensed.
So, thank you very much
for having me here,
and I'm really excited to hear
the rest of the presentations.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.