Introduction

Are literate women healthier, wealthier and even wiser than illiterate women? This is a question that has dominated debates on school and adult education in countries of the South.1 Women’s and girls’ education has been taken up by many governments and development agencies as the key to improving the lives of poor families. In particular, women’s literacy classes are often run as the entry point to other development interventions, such as family planning and child nutrition programmes. High drop-out rates from such programmes suggest however that the assumed link between women’s literacy and development can be disputed. Do women themselves feel that they need to read and write in order to learn about contraceptives or to find out about immunisation for their children? What are the real reasons why some women want to come night after night to study in literacy classes? Do they want to learn to decipher the labels on medicine bottles or to read religious texts or to write about their lives? This book, collecting together experiences from countries as diverse as El Salvador, India and Uganda, tries to answer some of these questions.