Educational and social centers in Tunisia to lift women out of illiteracy

Magdi Saidi - Tunisia

She walked through the narrow alleyways of the old city in the heart of the Tunisian capital until she reached the literacy class at the Social Center for Literacy and Adult Education, which was attended by dozens of women and girls with the aim of getting rid of them. From the specter of illiteracy.

Mabrouka al-Jabali had never believed that she would take her to school to learn to read and write. She was old enough, but she seemed proud to sit at the same age, one of the hundreds of thousands of Tunisian women suffering from illiteracy.

"I never entered school because I grew up in a rural environment where the education was limited to male members of the affluent families. After many years I decided to continue reading, writing, memorizing the Koran and learning skills under the guidance of our teacher Hamida," says the 63-year-old woman. May I get out of the circle of illiterate. "

High indicators
Mabrouka is one of the highest rates of illiteracy among women. It is 32% in late 2018 according to official reports of the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Tunisian Institute for Statistics.

In the center of the Center for Literacy and Adult Education in Hafsia, Tunis, dozens of illiterate women and girls are invited to receive literacy, numeracy and computer skills.

The increasing illiteracy rate among women is particularly a concern of both the social and the official community, and is pushing for radical solutions to the phenomenon by establishing centers for literacy and adult education aimed at those who are illiterate and literate.

The indicators of illiteracy are still high in Tunisia despite the efforts of the state to raise the rate of education and encourage it and to combat the phenomenon of early dropout, especially in the less fortunate areas of development, according to the director of the program of literacy and adult education in the Ministry of Social Affairs Hisham bin Abda.

In his interview with Al-Jazeera Net, Ben Abda knows illiteracy - according to indicators adopted by Tunisia - as "the inability to read, write and calculate for every person over the age of ten years."

According to official figures, 20% of Tunisians suffer from illiteracy in 2018, but these indicators rise for females to 37%, despite the contribution of the literacy program and adult education during the first years of its resurgence in reducing the number of illiterates in the country.

The indicators of illiteracy among women in Tunisia are markedly different among the regions, as they rise within the disadvantaged sectors of development and the socially fragile and poorest communities. In Kairouan governorate, the poorest country, illiteracy is about 36% Some areas of the province
To 52%.

Female illiteracy rates in the north-west governorates exceeded 31%, with Jendouba at 32%, Kef 27% and Kasserine 32%.

On the other hand, illiteracy indicators are low among women in the coastal regions and capital Tunis, with only 10% in Tunisia and 12% in Nabeul.

This imbalance is due to the large gap in development and the standard of living, given that illiteracy rates go hand in hand with poverty and deprivation of development according to the Director of the Literacy and Adult Education Program.

Social Centers
Tunisia is working to revitalize model social centers to reduce illiteracy. There are more than 80 literacy and adult education centers in the country for thousands of adults and women who are illiterate and supervised by some 1,400 social education teachers to combat illiteracy.

"A large number of women accept adult education programs, and many of them have learned to read, write and count, and they have obtained certificates in the collection of these skills," said Hamida Ben Gharbiya, a teacher of skills and crafts at the Hafsis Center for Literacy in Tunis.

In addition to Ben Gharbiya, three other teachers teach illiterate women to read and write at a rate of more than 3 classes a week in three disciplines: alphabet, skills and computer.

In addition to the local dimensions of combating illiteracy, Tunisia organized in January a conference entitled "Arab Day for Literacy", which aims to strengthen cooperation among Arab countries to reduce illiteracy indicators and to formulate a participatory policy to reduce the phenomenon among women in the Arab world.

According to reports issued by the Arab League for Education, Culture and Science (ALECSO) for 2018, the illiteracy rate of women in the Arab world is about 26%, but it rises to 60% in a number of countries in the region.