Salvador Sánchez Cerén, frontrunner in the El Salvadorian presidential elections (photo: wikipedia.org)

El Salvador Presidential Elections go to Second Round: With nearly all the votes counted, results indicate yesterday’s presidential election in El Salvador will go to a run-off on 9th March. Current vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén from the governing left-wing FMLN party received 48.9% of the votes, and will face conservative Norman Quijano from the Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA, who took 38.9% in the first round. The winner will take power on 1st June and will govern the country for the next five years. Both candidates accepted the results and announced their willingness to form alliances with other political parties. Sánchez Cerén has already reached out to the UNIDAD movement’s candidate, Elías Antonio Saca, to work together in the next government. Sunday’s election had a turnout of just 53%, according to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, almost ten percentage points lower than the 2009 elections.

Costa Rica Elections: Residents of Costa Rica also went to the polls yesterday to vote in the country’s general elections, choosing new representatives in congress, new governors, and a new president. With no outright winner, the two leading presidential candidates will face a run-off on 6th April. The governing Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN)’s candidate, Johnny Araya, who obtained 29.5% of the vote, will face Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC)’s Luis Guillermo Solís, who obtained 31% of the vote. Neither candidate has so far spoken of potential alliances, but it seems likely the winner will have to form some kind of coalition to govern, as they will face a divided congress when they take power on 8th May. PLN received 18 of the 57 legislative seats, PAC took 13, with the remainder divided between five other parties.

Honduras - Diplomatic Relations Re-established with Latin American countries: The governments of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador officially recognised Juan Orlando Hernández’s government in Honduras at last week’s Celac summit in Cuba. Following this, the three countries announced at the weekend they would re-establish diplomatic ties with the Central American nation after almost five years, when a coup ousted democratically-elected Juan Manuel Zelaya, leading to a political crisis in the country, and a diplomatic crisis in the region.

Cuba has Highest Literacy Rate in Latin America: According to a UNESCO report published on Saturday, Cuba has the highest literacy rate in Latin America. The annual report, entitled ‘Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All‘, highlighted the Caribbean island’s achievements, noting that 13% of the country’s GDP goes towards education, compared to a regional average of 5.5%. The report looked at countries’ progress under the Education for All global commitment to provide basic education for all children, youth, and adults, as agreed at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000. At the forum, 164 governments pledged to work towards six goals to be met by 2015, and are working with development agencies, civil society, and the private sector to achieve the targets, under the coordination of UNESCO. In Latin America, around 10% of children of school age are not achieving basic standards in reading and writing, and 30% are lacking in mathematics. Standards varied widely by country, and within social groups within national borders, with the poorest often faring the worst. For example, in Haiti only 42% of young people from a poor background know how to read and write, compared to 92% of their better off compatriots. The report highlighted that if current trends continue, developing countries will not achieve their targets until 2072.

Aymara women in Bolivia (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday, the Bolivian Ministry of Education announced that new learning materials in six indigenous languages will be produced and used in the national literacy programme from 2014.

The current programme to boost literacy rates in Bolivia was introduced under Morales’ presidency in 2006 and has up until now been run solely in Spanish.

Noél Aguirre, Vice Minister of Alternative and Special Education stated: “We are going to enter a new stage of literacy… that will not be in Castilian Spanish, but now in native languages.”

Aguirre gave the information, signalling that community libraries will form the base for strengthening the educational process, especially among adults.

The Ministry is producing material to include languages such as Quechuan, Aymara, Guarani and Beciro, providing indigenous communities with the opportunity to improve literacy in their own languages.

According to Aguirre, this had been demanded by several communities, where locals had already learned to read and write in Spanish, and now wanted to do the same in their original language.

The programme of educational changes is set out to help those most vulnerable in society, including those with special needs. “We will put a lot of emphasis on working with the disabled and for this also we will elaborate teaching methods such as sign language and Braille.”

Finally, Aguirre added that the city of El Alto, positioned just above Bolivian capital La Paz has already put the programme in practice on an experimental basis.

Illiteracy rates in Bolivia stood at 5.02% at the time of the Housing and Population Census in 2012. This figure shows a rise from the 2008 figure of 3.77%.

The President of the Dominican Republic, Danilo Medina, launched the first phase of the National Literacy Programme ‘Quisqueya Aprende Contigo’ on Tuesday. ‘Quisqueya Aprende Contigo’ is an educational programme which aims to teach more than 850,000 people how to read and write .

The director general of the programme, Pedro Luis Castellanos, defined it as an ambitious plan that seeks to expand and strengthen the freedom of the Dominican people, moving towards equality and social inclusion.

The first phase of the programme that kicked off today will last for the next two years, and aims to reach around 70,000 people. “It’s an opportunity to move towards a better country because every adult needs to strengthen its capabilities for a better personal, family and community life,” said Castellanos.

The government has brought together over six thousand trainers, who will begin to teach six hours of classes per week for the next six months.

Castellanos explained that at the end of the first phase, a programme evaluation committee will measure the progress of students and encourage them to complete basic education.

Regarding the methodology of selection and enrollment of students, Castellanos assured that state authorities had created municipal and provincial boards and then integrated them into the process.

This programme has the support of schools, universities, the military police and national police, churches, community organisations, political parties and neighborhood unions.

In 2012 87% of the population of The Dominican Republic could read and write (age 15 and over).

The Brazillian government announced it will invest around 700m reals (US$ 323m) in its “National Pact on Literacy at a Correct Age”.

The main objective of the programme is that all children up to eight years old can read and write in Portuguese and possess basic mathematic skills. At the moment, 15.2% of children in Brazil are illiterate. The Minister of Education Aloizio Mercadant considers this programme “a priority of priorities for the Ministry of Education.”

For the first round of the programme Mercadant expects to cover eight million children. Around 5,270 municipalities in 27 federal entities joined the campaign. Thirty-six public universities will prepare courses of 200 hours to standardise educational programmes nationally.

Moreover, the Ministry of Education will distribute 26.5m educational books in the schools, 4.6m dictionaries, 10.7m fiction books and 17.3m teaching books.

The Ministry of Education of the Dominican Republic has received 3,800 applications from potential volunteers hoping to participate in the literacy programme announced by President Danilo Medina on 10th September.

The National Literacy Plan, also known as “Quisqueya Learns With You,” declares literacy a fundamental human right for people over 14 years old, and hopes to eliminate illiteracy in the Dominican Republic, which currently stands at a rate of 9.7% (the official statistic according to the Central Bank’s National Labour Force Survey).

The consistency of this illiteracy rate over the last 30 years, according to Minister of Education Josefina Pimentel, “shows that despite many efforts, we still have not overcome as a society this social and ethical debt that we owe to 700,000 people”.

At the ceremony to announce the initiative, Medina called for at least 25,000 volunteers from social, religious, and university backgrounds that have experience in the field of literacy. So far, 3,800 have registered for the programme, which will begin on 7th January 2013 and aims to reach 725,000 Dominicans, 45.5% of whom live in urban areas and 54.5% of whom live in rural areas.

“There is nothing more liberating than when people have the opportunity to access the written word, the knowledge accumulated by humanity and the history of their own communities and people”, Medina said.

The Caribbean island nation hopes to be rid of illiteracy entirely by 8th September 2014, to coincide with World Literacy Day. Neighbouring Cuba leads the region with a literacy rate of about 99.8% according to the CIA World Factbook, a result of the Cuban Literacy Campaign implemented in 1961.