Paris, 8 September

New Literacy Initiative Launched

The World Association of Newspapers, along with UNESCO and the Education for All Forum, has launched a new world-wide literacy initiative that will ask children, "what if there was nothing to read?"

"We hope to persuade hundreds of newspapers across the world to co-operate with this project and to address their young readers, both directly through their own columns and through their established links with teachers and schools," said the WAN Director General, Timothy Balding, at a UNESCO ceremony marking International Literacy Day on Wednesday.

The Paris-based WAN, which represents 17,000 daily newspapers in 93 countries, will ask newspapers to print the question and encourage children to respond, as well as to pursue the project in schools through their Newspapers in Education programs.

The EFA Forum and WAN will present the results of the survey at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, next April, an event intended to diagnose the state of basic education in the world at the end of the "Education for All Decade."

"We hope that our joint survey will give the world community a chance to understand the importance of literacy in young people's lives, said Mr. Balding in his address to UNESCO ambassadors and others attending the ceremony at the UN agency's Paris headquarters.

Also attending the event were participants in WAN's 3rd International Newspapers in Education Conference, which brought more than 150 publishers, editors, commercial managers and journalists from newspapers in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe to Paris for three days. The conference ended Wednesday.

WAN, UNESCO and the EFA Forum are also involved in another co-operative project -- helping to bring NIE programs to five English-speaking and eleven French-speaking countries. "This is an ongoing project, involving newspapers, schools and education authorities, which we hope will be instrumental in helping to solve some of the problems associated with the shortage of textbook materials," said Mr. Balding.

WAN and the EFA Forum also jointly published a Newspapers in Adult Education sourcebook last year, which included case studies from all over the world which demonstrated how newspapers can contribute to meeting the basic learning needs of adults and help fight the scourge of adult illiteracy.

The Paris-based WAN, the global organization for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom world-wide. Its membership includes 61 national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives in 93 countries, 17 news agencies and seven regional and world-wide press groups.

Inquiries to:

Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 25 rue d'Astorg, 75008 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr