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Shashi Tharoor nearly became the successor to Kofi Annan as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Had he succeeded, it is likely he would have made the education of women around the world a top priority
“When I was at the UN and asked the one single to change the world, my answer is “educate girls.” He cited statistics that offered proof that if you educate a girl as opposed to a boy, the positive effect spreads out across the entire community with which the girl has, or eventually, will have contact.
Tharoor is today a chairman of the Dubai-based Afras Ventures and a patron of LitCam, the Frankfurt Book Fair Literacy Campaign. His comments came during the opening speeches of the second annual LitCam conference, which this year focused on the topic of multilingualism and – a term new to me – interculturalism in Europe and abroad.
Tharoor described a situation in his homeland of India where fewer than half the women in the country were literate. Yet, recounting his experience touring a charity school that catered exclusively to the children of families who made less than twenty euros a month, that learning to read was possibly the most impactful thing one could to change economic and social prospects.
“Economic success is based on education success”, he said, adding: “In the last century we were told of the objective to make the world safe for democracy, and while that is increasingly being realized, I think now through literacy, we can make the world safe for diversity and development.”
According to 2006 statistics from UNESCO, there are more than 774 million illiterate adults and ¾ of those live in only 12 countries, primarily in South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states.
NGOs and nonprofit organizations have long championed teaching people to read, but new strategies abound. Under LitCam’s own umbrella, the “Football meets Culture” project combines soccer training with inspirational lessons. In just two years, it has expanded from Germany to South Africa and then Turkey. Others participating in today’s programs included Tin Tua of Burkina Faso, the Mother Child Education Foundation of Turkey and the National Center for Family Literacy of Louisville, KY.
Among those attending the conference was Robert Cornford, marketing manager for the publication, books and journals, for Oxfam in the UK.
“Everything you do in development depends on literacy”, he said. “The printed word is how you communicate with people.”
The LitCam conference continues tomorrow in the Congress Center.
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