September 8, 2023
Did you know that more than 775 million people over the age of 15 are illiterate? That’s 17 percent of the world’s adult population.
Today is International Literacy Day. September is Rotary's Basic Education and Literacy Month.
One of Rotary International's goals is to strengthen the capacity of communities to support basic education and literacy, reduce gender disparity in education, and increase adult literacy.
Our Rotary Club is involved with numerous initiatives that support literacy, both here at home and further afield. Here are just a few of them:
- sponsoring the online Free Reading Program (accessible via our website)
- providing scholarships and bursaries to area high school students
- supporting the Dolly Parton Imagination Library
- maintaining three Books for Sharing boxes that were established in a partnership between Rotary, Dryden Public Library and the Friends of the Dryden Public Library
- providing funding support to the Ripple Effect program (a basic education and literacy program in Guatemala), and to the Amarok Society's program in Bangladesh that teaches mothers to teach children
"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential."
- Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General