Thank you Rebecca for valuable information .

“how literacy could assist in making non-literates and the poor in society functionally literate, at the
same time provide them with livelihood skills towards improved living standards and the development of their communities” Retrieved from,

Another example below, tells us specifically how literacy affects women’s upliftment and empowerment.

“Literacy, particularly for Zimbabwean women and girls, is important not only because it narrows the gap between the type of educational opportunities men have and those women have, but also because it has been shown to improve women’s health and to create sustainable economic and social development. Education increases women’s productivity, which provides a direct contribution to the economy. More significantly, education increases a woman’s self-esteem and her economic and political power, improves health and nutrition awareness, and reduces child birth and death rates and leads to improved child immunisation.”

Read more: Zimbabwe – Nonformal Education – Women, Study, Health, and Educational – StateUniversity.com

Deconstructing further, we see that formal education, as the mainstream form, has deprived many who cannot afford the cost of its formality, causing further the decline in quality of outcomes, as defined also by them, by what is ‘high quality education’ and ‘poor quality.’

And it seems the whole world has joined this trend of thought, forgetting the reality of what is more valuable for the realities in their own country contexts. We have looked at formal education as the more privileged that accessing NFE courses makes one underprivileged. Even governments mindsets have to be changed, as to how they really understand the relevance of formal, non-formal and informal education.

I would agree that the ways these three are understood and used is a reflection of a country’s economic, political and socio-cultural milieu. But what matters most here is how governance can mobilise resources to make formal, NFE and informal education relevant to this milieu, even if government has to categorise human resources accordingly. The more important is the aftermath, turnover of the learned to productive resources and earning decently.

Thank you Temesgen. You are absolutely right. Due to their formal education orientation whole system is focused on it. Once a district education officer said that he had 32 tasks related to FE so that he couldn’t give required time and thought to NFE related tasks, (which has no strong institutional base or mandate).
With this I would like to thank you all for actively participating in the discussion. Engaging in discussion with you all was very fruitful. Thank you again.

Taking the point of Susan I see the complexity in continuing education is absence of long term planning for adult and continuing education. Usually the programmes are planned on short-term ad hoc basis. There is no systematic process of entry assessment of learners and preparing customized learning plan for them. This is equally true for basic literacy courses and continuing education courses.

Besides the planning perspective, joining with Nafiz I would like to reiterate the importance of professional development of adult literacy/learning tutors. The scope of that is seldom there. Had there been such scope the tutors themselves could extend support to the learners to develop their learning plan based on entry assessment (even if they join the same course repeatedly).

To effectively intervene this situations, the root cause of negligence of non-formal education need to be considered. Therefore, the question raised by Dr.Sushan, “Where and how this situations can be intervened? ” The research need to focus on:in what way non-formal education be integrated with formal education, roles of schooling in adult literacy and how to prioritize learning to learn in school (to break out of the prison of formal education bastion, which assumes schooling as priding place of learning).

Unfortunately same here in Nepal. Bureaucrats are hard to convince about the significance and long term benefit of NFE for educational development and sustainable development.

yes, in most cases girls/young women restart after 2 or more years. this is why we need a continuous system of education/learning… so that women can start from where they are in terms of their knowledge and skills. Many of them are not motivated to start from the level of input that they don’t need.

These programs are flexible and modular, usually community-based and conducted at community learning centers. Although already in place, there are certain dimension of the system which are worth examining. ALS learning facilitators or mobile teachers encounter problems particularly on budget, staffing and learning materials. Much of its financial assistance come from Local Government Units and lack of coordination among LGUs and DepEd is often an issue. Like what Dr. Acharya said, NFE is not a priority of the government/donors. Why is it not possible to increase the budget for NFE? Why can’t we convince the government to consider NFE to be one of its major priorities?

There is a great deal of best practices worth documenting in this field but who will do the documentation? Facilitators? Researchers? Both? Or both of them plus the learners? Is there a budget for such collaborations? The government requires setting national standards and quality assurance practices. So, is there a possibility of creating local research units that will systematize and operationalise these types of collaboration?