In Jamaica, a New Look at Literacy

Above: the National Library of Jamaica

Jamaica’s Ministry of Education has partnered with UNESCO to implement a Literacy Assessment Monitoring Programme to accurately assess literacy levels among Jamaicans.

Jamaica is the first country in the Caribbean to put the project into effect, and the first in English.

“In putting together the national plan for attaining universal literacy, we could not find any statistics on which I could settle as the statistic that accurately defines the situation of literacy in Jamaica,” said Education Minister Andrew Holness.

According to the minister, data has varied over the years, with some data showing adult literacy levels at 76 percent, to others that showed it to be 90 percent.

That discrepancy was not as drastic at the primary level, where he said the government had a “fairly good” idea of literacy levels, which were about 67 percent among students in fourth grade last year.

“In today’s world, where the economy revolves around information, the ability to process information requires your population to have the fundamental basic skills to communicate, read, write and compute,” he said.

The Literacy Assessment Monitoring Programme is managed by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics in Montreal, Canada.

LAMP is hosting a workshop that began on Monday that aims at helping the Jamaican team in designing a monitoring plan.

–Jamaica Information Service