Poverty also means unemployment, under-employment, lack of opportunities and lack of knowledge. Men and women in poor countries will not be able to get out of poverty if they lack the right skills to engage in a new activity and increase their productivity, if they are illiterate, and have no access to information and technology.

Today, about 800 million adults are illiterate(1) of which almost two-thirds (64%) are women. In Pakistan, about 48 million people are illiterate of which about 64 percent corresponds to women. In rural Sindh, the female literacy rate is only 13% and in other remote regions it can be less than 10%.

Today, over 23% of the workers in the developing world live on less than US$1 a day(2). In Madagascar the average income per capita is about US$300.

Today, over 500 million people work in poverty, with low income and insufficient productivity to move forward and get out of poverty.

Today, the poorer the population, the more they are isolated, the less access they have to technology, and the less they are able to participate in their communities’ development efforts.

Palms for Life Fund supports adult literacy, especially for women, vocational training and skills development, and microfinance, providing they converge and complement other development efforts. For instance in Ecuador, parents of children who receive deworming treatment in school learn to read and write about preventing intestinal diseases and improving the health and hygiene practices at home. In Nicaragua, parents establish community gardens to complement food aid being provided in children’s dining halls, thus making the supply of food a sustainable activity.

In Thailand, families who want to become business partners with the Population and Community Development Association can receive loans of up to US$300 per family but put up as collateral that the girls stay in school. Young girls who decide to start a business, receive US$250 per girl in a group. In this case, the collateral is that the girls participate in non-formal education as an acceptable substitute for enrollment in the formal educational system. To read more on microfinance, click here

In Guatemala, women acquired a new income-generating skill by learning how to make soap so that they could sell it to the schools and other community members to support better hygiene practices. A small credit of $500 allowed them to buy the equipment; they learned basic mathematics as part of the business training as well as basic business concepts such as cost-effectiveness and productivity. They also benefited from training on group organization and learned how to negotiate with their husbands the need to share household tasks and child care so that they can contribute to the household income.

In the case of a reforestation project in Nepal, the group realized that the women had been kept away from the discussions about the kind of trees to plant despite the fact that they were the ones responsible for growing the small plants. Special courses were organized for women about how to get better organized, to speak up in their own language and at the same time, how to manage their nursery in a more cost effective way.

Palms encourages those initiatives that provide people with new skills to enhance their income and productivity, that teach them how to read and write, to actively participate in meetings, to make the right decisions about their needs and have the capacity to define locally-adapted solutions to their problems.

With new and updated vocational skills and fully literate, adults will engage in new productive projects; they will have a clear understanding of basic concepts such as cost-effectiveness and productivity; they will be in a better position to negotiate improved working conditions or prices for their products – more so if they are socially organized. Young people will feel motivated to remain in their communities instead of contributing to urban poverty by migrating to the cities without any means of survival.

Adult education and literacy, especially functional literacy, including mathematics, have a direct impact on elevating the level of confidence amongst adults, providing them with improved communication skills, with the capacity of expressing their needs and being heard, and also being more informed and thus more participative in their community’s affairs and development.

Studies show a direct link between adult education and the health of the family. Providing literacy classes to mothers has a direct effect on the nutrition of the family and on the out-of-school rate, in other words, the more a mother is literate, the more chances there are that she will send her kid to school(3). In general, educated adults have higher commitments to their children’s education.