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Outline
1. Introduction
2. Defining illiteracy
3. Types of illiteracy
A. Complete illiteracy
B. Functional illiteracy
4. Defining Economic incompetency
5. How illiteracy breeds economic incompetencies
A. At individual level
i) Illiterate individual get jobs which pay less
ii) Unemployment rate is higher among illiterate individuals
B. At Business level
i) The cost of fixing incorrect product
ii) Customers lost due to poor communication
iii) Lower technological skills
C. At national level
i) Slow growth of GDP
ii) Resourcefully rich states remain poor due to mismanagement—Case
study of Pakistan
6. Comparison among literate and illiterate countries and their impact on
economy
A. Highly literate countries enjoy high economic prosperity
B. Illiterate societies have negative attitude towards government policies
leading to economic inequalities
7. Causes of illiteracy
A. Cultural factors
B. Illiterate parents
C. Poverty—a vicious cycle
8. Recommendations
A. Awareness about the problem
B. Literacy programmes for all
C. Special emphasis on female education
9. Conclusion
Raj was graduate from a top university. He was travelling by rail from Mumbai
to Jaipur. He came face to face with an old man. Raj was enjoying music. Out of
intrigue, the old man asked about the mobile phone. Raj explained all the features.
After a while, when old man asked Raj to help him read the newspaper as he was
having difficulty, Raj was dumb as he did not know how to read. Indeed, both were
illiterate. Maya Angelou said, “Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our
history as the abolition of slavery.” Illiteracy can exist at any stage in life. It hurts
nations, businesses and individuals and it eventually leads to economic
incompetence.
The United Nations defines illiteracy as the inability to read and write a simple
message in any language. It also means the actual or perceived state of being
uneducated or insufficiently educated. The social judgement is so powerfully built
into the term illiterate that scholars now generally use more neutral terms, such as
non-literate and pre-literate. Formerly, the term illiterate was used to describe
someone without book learning or a liberal education, even though such a person
could read in a vernacular language or handle accounts and correspondence.
However, the word also carried the connotation of ‘unpolished’, ‘ignorant’, or
‘inferior’, as in ‘the disadvantage of an illiterate education’
Illiteracy is of two types. The first one is “Complete Illiteracy”, which means
that a person is unable to read and write. According to UNESCO, a person is
complete illiterate who cannot understand to read and write a short simple statement
in his everyday life. In simple words, complete illiteracy means what we
comprehend from the word illiterate, which means that a person is unable to read
and write or cannot comprehend the meaning. When we say that a person is illiterate,
we generally mean complete illiteracy.
Secondly, any business can lose its customers due to poor communication.
Illiterate business representatives is the major cause of poor communication. For
example, in retail business, when an employee of the company has to interact with
the customer, then prior knowledge of the product is required in order to deal with
the customer. If the employee is illiterate or lacking basic skills to communicate then
company can lose its customers. According to Forbes, businesses lost $75B
worldwide due to poor communication.
Contrary to that, countries with higher illiteracy rates are economically less
sound and dependent on other countries for their survival. In case of Afghanistan,
literacy rate is only 28pc. The major cause of this bleak picture of economy is
illiteracy. According to UNICEF, 1000 schools have been closed since the last
decade, 500000 children are deprived of school till now, 3.7m children between the
ages of 7 and 17 are currently out of school.
Moreover, illiterate societies have negative attitudes towards the policies of
the government which leads to economic incompetencies. In case of economy, the
policies of the government involve taxation on products, income taxes, sales taxes,
toll taxes, taxes on import and export of products, filing of returns, utility bills etc.
Sadly, the illiterate individuals look at all of these policies as a burden and as a result
either try to evade the taxes or pay less. This consequently causes economic
problems not only for the government, but also eventually for the entire society. The
tax to GDP ratio of highly literate societies like America is 27pc. However, tax to
GDP ratio of illiterate societies like Afghanistan is only 6pc.
In order to address the problem, one needs to first understand the causes. At
first, cultural factors are responsible for causing illiteracy. Culture is related to
different spheres of life. For example, if in a particular geographical area, the sole
dependency of a society is on agriculture for their survival, then the culture demands
the individuals to remain stick to agriculture and as a result individuals do not build
their capacity to move ahead in life. Similarly, there are cultures which forbade
women to get education. For example, around 60pc of children which are out of
school in Afghanistan are girls.