UNESCO, Regional Office of Southern Africa, is hosting International Literacy Day celebrations 2021 under the theme ‘Literacy for a human-centred recovery: Narrowing the digital divide’. The regional event will take place on Friday 10^th September 2021 from 10:00 until 12:00.

This year’s celebrations are taking place amidst the new Youth and Adult Literacy strategy for the period 2020-2025. The main goal of the strategy is to guide UNESCO’s work towards supporting Member States in ‘ensuring that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy by 2030’, as captured in SDG Target 4.6. The strategy also intends to contribute indirectly to achieving other SDGs with four strategic priority areas,which are:

• Supporting Member States in developing national literacy policies and strategies;
• Addressing the learning needs of disadvantaged groups, particularly women and girls;
• Leveraging digital technologies to expand access and improve learning outcomes; and
• Monitoring progress and assessing literacy skills and programmes.

Objectives

The objectives of the regional webinar are to:

• share knowledge and experiences regarding equitable, inclusive and effective distance and digital literacy learning for youth and adults with no or low literacy skills
• explore the interplay between literacy and digital skills and the ways in which digital skills can be effectively integrated into literacy teaching and learning, and
• identify main issues to be addressed for reimagined distance and digital literacy learning that can contribute to fulfilling the right to literacy of all young people and adults in times of COVID-19 and beyond, and
• celebrate the winning of the 2021 UNESCO - King Sejong Literacy prize for mother language based literacy development in the Southern Africa region by Puku for Children’s Literature Foundation, South Africa.