ABSTRACT
The Experimental World Literacy Programme (EWLP) was the first large-scale multilateral program to be developed and implemented with an explicit concern for evaluation, and it is here that its important implications can be found. For UNESCO, evaluation would demonstrate the validity of its claims to technical competence in development and literacy education. But by its very nature, evaluation presented its political problems. By 1966, the UNESCO General Conference, stimulated of course by the Secretariat, was describing widely divergent purposes and functions: innovative, experimental and demonstrative. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) held consistently to this approach, while UNESCO argued its commitment to a broader rationale and set of interests in literacy work. The head of the Iranian pilot project's evaluation team, Miroslav Bazany, claimed that the UNDP displayed little interest in evaluation, did not issue any documentation to guide the process, but merely stressed 'the need to prove or disprove the hypothesis that work-oriented literacy is a factor in development'.
