Literacy and adult education through distance and open learning

As we enter the new millennium, illiteracy remains a worldwide problem. Official statistics claim that there are today more than one billion adults who are nonliterate, vast numbers of whom are women. The world map of illiteracy is also the world map of poverty. By and large, the non-literate are poor, hungry, sick, powerless, exploited. Development planners claim that illiteracy is a bottleneck to development. Most national governments have therefore recognised the importance of dealing with the problem of adult illiteracy in order to accelerate the process of development.