Rotary projects promoting basic education and literacy

If illiteracy were a simple problem, Rotarians would have solved it by now.

The issues are myriad: a scarcity of schools and learning materials, insufficient government spending on education, and cultural stigmas that limit education for women and girls, to name a few. And the problem goes far beyond the inability to decipher words on a page. In an increasingly complex world, poor reading comprehension condemns adults to the lowest rungs of society.

Rotarians, however, are committed to improving the situation. Rotary clubs worldwide have been carrying out thousands of literacy projects for decades. Basic education and literacy is one of Rotary's areas of focus.

Rotary's work in literacy has included rebuilding schools destroyed by natural disasters in Sri Lanka and Haiti, partnering with the Dollywood Foundation's Imagination Library to promote early childhood reading, and teaching students to read and write through the concentrated language encounter method in Brazil and Turkey.