Sri Lanka’s ‘glowing’ literacy status misleads the world
A young Sri Lankan university teacher from the Jaffna University specialising in youth development strongly criticised statistical jargon released by state agencies saying these tend to give a wrong impression of the actual status of these sectors.
Addressing the opening sessions of the two day ‘Youth Development Programme “WeAre 2030 – Youth Dialogue and Incubation” on Tuesday at the BMICH – Colombo, Kabilan Suntharamoorthy, Lecturer in Community and Regional Planning, Development of Geography, Jaffna University and a volunteer in ‘Youth Empowerment’ said that the country’s literacy rate doesn’t reflect the actual meaning of ‘literacy’.
Thus, he said it gives the world a ‘wrong identity’ as if Sri Lanka is high in literacy in South Asia and that country would be among the developed countries. He said, “We are not at that level as the indicators are taken only of writing and reading and due to these small errors in the indicators our country is getting the worst identity in the world”.
He said that people think that marginalised groups are from the conflict ridden border areas, but marginalised youth also include those who cannot obtain a job according to their qualifications. One reason for unemployed youth to get marginalised is that they don’t have access to the right information.
Stressing that investment in youth is a priority, he said such policies should definitely have to be long term.
He said that the social welfare of the youth that was impacted due to the conflict should be resuscitated, which would otherwise lead to marginalising the youth. It is time to find out whether the conflict arises between the people, between the politicians or between groups of people.
This programme to train 350 youth picked up across the country is hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), joined by Unilever Sri Lanka and several ministries and state agencies.
Opening the inaugural session, Jorn Sorensen, Sri Lanka Country Director, UNDP said that their agency is committed to youth empowerment and through the agency’s initiatives engage young women and men as transformative actors for change.
Yet the challenges they face, he said are unprecedented in climate change, unemployment in multiple forms of inequalities and exclusion and in particular for youth belonging to vulnerable or marginalised groups, though youth are today more connected, creative, informed and more persuasive than earlier as everywhere they are responding to the challenges of the day with innovative approaches.
He said, “Following the World Conference on Youth that was held in Sri Lanka in 2014, which put Sri Lanka’s sizeable youth population exceeding four million in the spotlight, many policies and action plans have been drawn up to empower youth in Sri Lanka”.
He indicated that the joint project initiated by the National Youth Services Council and UNDP this year, supports the development of a holistic and innovative 3-year action plan for the National Youth Council together with an institutional resource mapping to transform the service delivery of the institution.
Niroshan Perera, Deputy Minister of National Policies and Economic Affairs, conceded that though Sri Lanka has a high literacy rate, problems in the educational system persists, thus a major problem has arisen creating an acute skills mismatch especially among the school-leavers in finding employment.
The educational system, he pointed out is narrowly structured and only few are selected for university education while the majority who pass out are left with inadequate skills to enter the labour market.
In a bid to eliminate this mismatch, he said that the government has decided to include vocational training at secondary and higher school levels and commended the UNDP initiative of “We Are 2030”. He said that this programme comes at a crucial juncture as the government too is working hard to put the youth on top of the development strategy of the country.