"100 dictionaries distributed 600 more during October 2011"
Rotary International has designated the month of March as Literacy Month and as such all Rotarians are called upon to increase their focus on literacy efforts in their communities and around the world. Guided by the RI’s objectives The Rotary Club of St. Maarten since October 2009 has been distributing English Dictionaries to third grade students during the month of October to all Government subsidized primary schools on St. Maarten and this year the first 100 were distributed on 10-10-11 to Oranje School, St. Joseph School and Sr. Borgia School.
If illiteracy were such a simple problem, Rotarians would have solved it by now. The reasons that so many people can’t read or write are myriad: a scarcity of schools and learning materials, insufficient government spending on education, cultural stigmas that limit education for women and girls, and more. The problem goes far beyond the inability to decipher words on a page. In an increasingly complex world, poor reading comprehension condemns adults to the lowest rungs of society. The magnitude of the problem is daunting. UNICEF estimates that one billion children and adults, approximately 15 percent of the world’s population, lack basic literacy skills.
According to the International Reading Association, which cooperates with many Rotary clubs worldwide on literacy projects, 113 million children in developing countries alone are not in school and not learning to read. And worldwide, approximately 500 million women are illiterate, making up two-thirds of the adult population that cannot read. Literacy rates vary widely, according to a 2007 UNESCO report, ranging from 23.6 percent in Burkina Faso in West Africa to more than 99 percent in North America, Europe, and a majority of former Soviet republics and allies. But even those high literacy rates are deceiving.
In the developed world, people who can only recognize words on paper cannot compete in an environment that requires high-level comprehension skills to get even basic jobs, shouldn’t be to have basic literacy; it should be to be proficient with reading."
And yet there is reason for hope. Rotary clubs worldwide have been pursuing thousands of literacy projects for decades. In 1992, RI established its first Literacy Task Force to assist clubs and districts in creating literacy projects.
In the coming weeks, under the leadership of Committee Chairperson Henna Budhrani all 16 primary school third grade students will receive their own dictionary. According to the established curriculum this is the period in which the students start learning to use the English dictionary.