International Literacy Day: Learning from Bricks of Change

International Literacy Day: Learning from Bricks of Change

Created: Friday, 07 September 2018 15:18

International Literacy Day: Learning from the Bricks of Change

By Homraj Acharya

International Literacy Day is celebrated each year on September 8. This year’s theme is Literacy and Skill Development, intended to recognize that the skills required for work have been evolving rapidly and that literacy is closely linked with technical and vocational skills. Literacy is becoming a precondition for survival in the current and future employment space for all people.

To see how literacy is a survival tool and how it is linked to skill development, simply go speak with the brick workers of Nepal. The Global Fairness Initiative and Better Brick Nepal have analyzed data on over 7,000 brick workers and found that 46 percent of workers are illiterate. That means that 46 percent of workers in the 1,295 brick industries strewn around the country do not know how many bricks they make, don’t know how much they have earned or what has been written in their contracts. Their rights might be written in the legal documents and NGO’s training leaflets and manuals, but they have to rely on others to tell them about it.

Many of these are among the 102 million illiterate people in the world between the ages of 15 and 24. These are not elderly people, born and raised before schooling was available in Nepal. A kiln is a place of hard manual labor, full of young, strong women and men, many of whom come with their children, who then live on the premises and work making bricks, continuing the cycle of illiteracy that robbed their parents of choices in life.

These people are highly vulnerable to exploitation and are more likely to be in the situation of debt bondage. Kiln workers often end up as forced and bonded laborers because they take loans from labor agents that they cannot repay, without understanding the loan conditions. They then fall deeper and deeper into debt, victims of exploitation to which they are vulnerable in part because of their illiteracy.

Literacy and education challenges are compounded for people who have to move seasonally with their family to look for work. So many things get lost in the annual transition and access to education is one of them. One effective way that we have found to combat the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and victimization at kilns has been through a program designed to meet the needs of migrant children, the Bridge Schools Program.

The Bridge Schools model uses four step process: 1) enroll children either in kiln constructed Early Childcare and Education Centers (ECEC) or the government ECD centers; 2) create linkages to nearby schools to ensure that migratory children of kiln workers can access education; 3) develop skill learning centers (SLC) activities for older children that are not interested in going to schools and sitting in formalized education settings but can be reached through vocational programs; and 4) provide before and after school program for children who are enrolled in school but need extra help to catchup with their peers to succeed in schools.

While the Bridge Schools Program prevents child labor and ensures that the next generation is not deprived of their education, adult workers are also trained on basic literacy skills including reading and writing their names, rudimentary counting so they can track their production totals and wages, and other essentials skills such understanding their rights and how to resolve conflicts within the kiln environment.

Teachers are also trained to address the needs of migrant children and the school itself becomes more sensitive to people who come from vulnerable backgrounds that may share similarities to the kiln children.

The Bridge Schools model can be used by any industry or sector where many workers are migratory in nature. Nepal is scheduled to graduate out of Least Developed Country (LDC) designation in December of 2021. However, if 46% of 200,000 kiln workers are still illiterate, and if the overall percent of illiterate population remains at the present 43%, the graduation will be only ceremonial, as the vulnerability of these people will have remained at the level of LDCs.

On the occasion of International Literacy Day, I urge government, private sector, civil society, political leaders, and development partners to not forget about the people working in invisible and informal sectors and to create collaborative platform to incorporate inclusive literacy strategies that have worked in their development programs.

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Homraj Acharya is an International Development professional. He is Senior Advisor for South Asia at the Global Fairness Initiative (GFI)—an International development organization headquartered in Washington, DC that promotes locally rooted solutions for the global economy and champions decent work around the world.