If you can read and com­pre­hend this, you should not take it for grant­ed.

Be­ing lit­er­ate opens the door to ac­cess­ing ba­sic and some­times nec­es­sary in­for­ma­tion.

But un­for­tu­nate­ly, many peo­ple still strug­gle with ac­quir­ing that skill.

How­ev­er, to­day, In­ter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Day 2022, gives us the per­fect op­por­tu­ni­ty to recom­mit to en­sur­ing qual­i­ty, eq­ui­table and in­clu­sive ed­u­ca­tion for all.

Since 1967, In­ter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Day cel­e­bra­tions have tak­en place an­nu­al­ly glob­al­ly, to re­mind the pub­lic of the im­por­tance of lit­er­a­cy as a mat­ter of dig­ni­ty and hu­man rights, and to ad­vance the lit­er­a­cy agen­da to­ward a more lit­er­ate and sus­tain­able so­ci­ety.

In 1979, ac­cord­ing to glob­al sta­tis­tics, on­ly 68 per cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion knew how to read and write. In 2020, that fig­ure rose to 86.7 per cent.

De­spite the progress made, lit­er­a­cy chal­lenges per­sist, with the Unit­ed Na­tions Ed­u­ca­tion­al, Sci­en­tif­ic and Cul­tur­al Or­gan­i­sa­tion (UN­ESCO) es­ti­mat­ing that glob­al­ly, at least 771 mil­lion young peo­ple and adults lack ba­sic lit­er­a­cy skills to­day.

School clo­sures and oth­er dis­rup­tions caused by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic have fur­ther stymied glob­al lit­er­a­cy ef­forts.

Ac­cord­ing to UN­ESCO, in the af­ter­math of the pan­dem­ic near­ly 24 mil­lion learn­ers may nev­er re­turn to for­mal ed­u­ca­tion.

The theme for this year’s In­ter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Day is Trans­form­ing Lit­er­a­cy Learn­ing Spaces.

The Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al of UN­ESCO Au­drey Azoulay has said In­ter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Day is an op­por­tu­ni­ty “to as­sess progress and spur mo­men­tum to­wards cel­e­brat­ing lit­er­a­cy as an es­sen­tial hu­man right that plays a fun­da­men­tal role with­in our so­ci­eties.”

To­day is, there­fore, a good day to cel­e­brate and ho­n­our those who have been fight­ing to help ad­dress our lit­er­a­cy sit­u­a­tion.

Two of those or­gan­i­sa­tions cel­e­brate their 30th an­niver­sary this year.

In 1992, the Adult Lit­er­a­cy Tu­tors As­so­ci­a­tion (AL­TA) was formed and has been pro­vid­ing class­es na­tion­wide for thou­sands of cit­i­zens who strug­gle with read­ing and writ­ing.

Al­so in 1992, Moms for Lit­er­a­cy was birthed to ad­dress the grow­ing lit­er­a­cy needs of chil­dren be­tween the ages of four to 17.

The 1994 AL­TA and 1995 UWI Na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Sur­veys showed that 22-23 per cent of our pop­u­la­tion aged 15 and over, are un­able to cope with every­day read­ing and writ­ing.

AL­TA’s sur­vey found that more than 60,000 adults in T&T could not read even three of the fol­low­ing words: to, at, love, sun and bet.

We have seen the im­pact that the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has had on our chil­dren with this year’s Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment ex­am­i­na­tion re­sults, where on­ly 37 per cent scored high­er than 50 per cent. Of the 19,079 who wrote the ex­am, some 9,000 pupils who scored less than 50 per cent in the SEA en­tered sec­ondary school this week.

But what of the many oth­ers who may have fall­en through the cracks and may nev­er find their way back in­to the sys­tem?

Who knows now whether the good work done by AL­TA and Moms for Lit­er­a­cy has been un­done by the pan­dem­ic, af­ter it forced chil­dren to the realm of vir­tu­al learn­ing which many could not ac­cess.

Now is the time for us to come to­geth­er and find out ex­act­ly where we are as a coun­try con­cern­ing lit­er­a­cy and ac­tive­ly try to cor­rect any short­com­ings that may ex­ist.