PARIS, SEPTEMBER 2 – TELL ME – Theatre for Education and Literacy Learning of Migrants in Europe programme – is one of the winners of the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy, rewarding programmes that benefits rural populations and out-of-school youth, particularly girls and women. The program is managed by the Italian not-for-profit organization, Nuovo Comitato il Nobel per i Disabili from Italy, founded by theatre authors Dario Fo and Franca Rame in 1997 to use for charity the money awarded by the Nobel Prize for Literature. It improves migrants’ literacy skills through a theatre-based teaching approach that uses storytelling in the learners’ mother language before moving gradually to learning the host countries language.
The awards will be handed on International Literacy Day on Monday 9 September at UNESCO’s Headquarters in Paris. Since 1967, UNESCO has awarded International Literacy Prizes to outstanding and innovative programmes that promote literacy. Throughout the years, the prestigious Prizes have rewarded over 490 initiatives undertaken by governments and NGOs across the world.
The International Literacy Prizes this year recognize projects from Algeria, Colombia, Indonesia, Italy and Senegal. The 2019 prizes honour outstanding work relating to this year’s theme: literacy and multilingualism.
Literacy is the starting point for any form of quality inclusive education and we need to support and scale up the many initiatives across the globe seeking to make literacy a reality for all,” said the Director General Audrey Azoulay.
As UNESCO leads the celebration of the International Year of Indigenous Languages, the need to rethink literacy education is all the more pressing considering that in 2016 only 5% of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages were present on the Internet and 50 per cent of spoken languages were considered to be in danger of disappearing.
The two UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize awards for mother-tongue literacy education and training, sponsored by the Republic of Korea, will be awarded in a ceremony at 5pm to: the National Strategy for Multilingual Literacy programme of Algeria’s National Adult Literacy and Education Office for its support for mother tongue-based literacy for adults in two national languages, Tamazight and Arabic, and Senegal’s Textile Fibres and Development Company (SODEFITEX) for its functional literacy and follow-up vocational training for farmers in southern Senegal, a community-driven project that provides literacy classes in three national languages alongside agriculture-related skills development courses.
TELL ME, created within the Erasmus program, will win one of the three awards of the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy, supported by the Government of the People’s Republic of China. The other two winning programmes are The Obras Escuela programme of Camacol Antioquia, the Colombian construction industry’s professional organization in the department of Antioquia, which provides flexible literacy learning in Spanish and English for building industry workers with limited, or no, previous schooling in the workplace and the BASAbali Wiki programme of Indonesia’s BASAbali group, a multimedia wiki dictionary initiative to preserve and value local languages alongside national and international tongues, through the engagement of people in Bali and abroad.
Also on 9 September, from 9am to 6pm, UNESCO will host an International Conference on Literacy and multilingualism at its Headquarters in Paris. The event will bring together stakeholders and decision-makers from all over the world to rethink literacy in information rich and increasingly multilingual societies. The award ceremony of UNESCO’s International Literacy Prizes will conclude the Organization’s global celebration ofInternational Literacy Day. (@OnuItalia)
