Rotary has long recognised that permanent solutions to the most pressing mass problems that currently afflict the human race will not be found without alleviation of mass illiteracy wherever it exists. Poverty, problems of widespread disease, hunger, crime and enmity are all related to lack of educational opportunity.

Rotary clubs and districts have been engaged in literacy projects at home and internationally as long as anyone can remember, but the first literacy project of Rotary International itself was the publication in 1985 of The Right to Read Literacy Around the World, edited by Past Rotary District Governor Professor Eve Malmquist of Sweden. That book drew attention to the incidence of illiteracy among adults in developing countries like India, Egypt, Nigeria and Latin America and also industrialised countries including the USA, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. The central message of that book was that illiteracy is "a grave block to international understanding and cooperation, and the most stubborn threat to peace in our time because it divides nations within themselves and among one another into two groups" - those who "have" and those who neither have or can hope to have anything other than an unending, cycle of poverty from one generation to the next.

The first of the large-scale Rotary literacy projects, funded by the Rotary Foundation to the extent of US$680,000 in my home country, Thailand, began soon after that, in 1987. In fact the pilot work that preceded the Thailand literacy project began in the year of publication of The Right to Read, 1985. That work has now spread to many other countries, usin£1 the strategies that were developed from a decade of large scale field work. Those strategies are the use of Concentrated Language Encounter (CLE) techniques for language and literacy teachingmand program building and employment of the Lighthouse strategy for spreading the work across nations and internationally. Of necessity, this paper will be restricted largely to describing Rotary's contribution to alleviation of mass illiteracy through use of the Lighthouse Literacy Strategy.

The steps of the Lighthouse Literacy Strategy are:

1. First to develop large exemplary Rotary Literacy Projects in strategic locations throughout the developing world, each of which demonstrates a solution to a large scale literacy problem.

2. These Rotary "Lighthouse " Projects will be used to inspire, guide and support the authorities of each country to eliminate that problem, nation-wide.

3. Rotary Lighthouse Literacy Projects also inspire and support the establishment of similar projects in other countries.

4. And finally, cooperation with other international agencies to spread the work world-wide.

What Has Already Been Done

The "lighthouse" strategy is already well developed. As 1 shall show you, it has proved highly effective in alleviating mass literacy problems in a number of developing countries and there seems to be no reason why it would not succeed equally well in other parts of the developing world.

The Lighthouse Literacy work began from a small Matching Grant pilot project, in schools in remote rural villages in Thailand, sponsored by Rotary in Australia and my own Rotary District in Thailand. That led to a 3-H project literacy project (in the Thai language) in 400 schools in four provinces of Thailand. By the end of the 1997's, the government adopted the program for all 76 provinces of Thailand, so that it is now in every government school in my country of 60 million people. That alone is a huge achievement for one Rotary project.

But the project in Thailand has also inspired and given technical support for similar work in other countries. Consequently, a large Rotary Foundation project in Bangladesh began last year to assist the national Ministry of Education there to develop a more effective school literacy program and spread it to all parts of that nation. A third 3H Literacy Project began this year in the Solomon Islands, with every likelihood that the work ill spread across the other nations of the South Pacific.

Successful pilot work has been done in Nepal by a Rotarian from the USA, who was also trained in Thailand. And at the request of the Laos government 1 am currently helping Laos educators to replicate the work that has been done in Thailand.

So the effectiveness of the "lighthouse" strategy has been proved again and again. These are not isolated projects of the "band-aid" type. Each has been aimed at alleviating mass illiteracy across an entire nation, and it is clear that the Lighthouse Literacy Strategy will enable us to make a systematic attack on mass illiteracy in developing countries, nation by nation.

It clearly has the capacity to change the world, and the Literacy and Numeracy Task Force has set its sights on helping to do just that:

1. This year, Rotary has set up a Literacy and Numeracy Task Force whose mission it is to set up Lighthouse Projects in other parts of the developing world, such as Africa, India, the Mediterranean Region, Latin America and other parts of Asia. I am an Assistant Coordinator for this region of Asia.

2. Besides projects within the formnal schooling system such as the one ' Thailand, we are concerned with three other types of programs across the developing world:

a) Non-formal education, concentrating on integrated literacy and vocational programs for women.

b) Programs for street children (older children not at school) in such countries as Egypt, India, the Philippines, and Bangladesh and

c) Programs for special groups such as hill-tribe people, migrant people and the disabled.

Task Force Goals

In the seven months since this Rotary year began, the Rotary and Numeracy Task Force has made substantial progress towards those goals in all parts of the world.

a) In Ju1y, August and September 1997, workshops were held in all four regions of the developing world : Cape Town for sub-Saharan Africa, Bangkok for Asia, Cairo for the north Africa/Mediterranean region, and Caracas for Latin America. As a result, some 150 pilot projects of all four types have been proposed by Rotary clubs and districts in developing countries across the Rotary world.

b) We have developed strategies to assist with project planning and train Technical Coordinators to lead the educational team for the project Project coordinators have already come to Thailand from South Africa. Nepal, Egypt, India and Brazil, 1 am on my way to conduct training in Turkey and soon will do the same in Egypt and Brazil.

c) We shall monitor and evaluate the pilot project, and

d) We have already produced a video and a teachers' manual that explain the CLE methodology for beginning students and we plan to produce other teaching and project planning guides during the coming year. After clusters of successful projects are developed in various parts of the world, we shall conduct workshops to train teacher trainers for the various types of projects, using those clusters as training bases.

e) We are working systematically towards developing at least two 3H Lighthouse Project in each of the four regions of the developing world, to serve as training and technical support centres for their own nation and also for other countries in that part of the world.

f) Our plan is to have the first of those Lighthouse Centres operating early in 1998-99 and the remainder in the following year.

There will not be a literate world by the year 2000, but we feel that if we work systematically and in cooperation with education authorities and other agencies, Rotary can by then have helped to show the way towards a literate world. That is why we have a representative at this and all the other UNESCO regional conferences of this year.

Contact Info:

Associate Professor
Dr.Saowalak Rattanavich
Srina arinwirot University
Bangkok, Thailand.