Almost 25 percent of Xekong province's adult population is illiterate, but local education officials want this number reduced to zero by 2015.

Xekong Non-Formal Education Office Head, Ms Sisa-nga Keoduangdy, admitted officials faced a hard task to meet this goal.
Of people aged 15-40, records show more than 9,000 are illiterate out of 37,297 people in 107 villages.

Ms Sisa-nga said it was difficult to engage local people in training programmes, which have been running since 1996, because the course took four months to complete.
“It is not easy to call on the local illiterate people to spare their working time to study with us,” she said.

Most of them are poor people and have to work all day long, each day, at their farms.”
Ms Sisa-nga believes more people would participate in the course if they were offered an extra incentive, such as rice.

This practice is already occurring in some target areas where NGOs like World Concern have attracted more people to join training programmes by giving them rice or education materials.

“We are trying to seek many different ways to get support from donors as well as government funding in order to motivate illiterate people to join our training courses by using the example set by World Concern,” Ms Sisa-nga said.

One of the main causes of illiteracy is that many children do not attend school until later in life, or do not attend school at all. Ms Sisa-nga said many of these people could not read or write a single word and most of them were women.

Xekong is encouraging all illiterate people to enroll in basic literacy courses conducted by the office authorities, but only some have done this.

The Ministry of Education has encouraged volunteer teachers from villages to run four-month courses with day or evening classes for those who want to study in their spare time as well as during the weekends.

In larger provinces volunteer teachers receive 400,000 kip to teach a four-month course, but in Xekong they are paid 100,000 kip to teach the same course.

Currently, 269 teachers in Xekong's target villages are running these courses.
Ms Sisa-nga said Xekong could not yet announce any districts which were completely literate, but she hoped that in 2010 Lamam and Thateng districts would be the first two declared literate in the province.

By Soulivan Vongmany
Vientiane Times

http://www.vientianetimes.org.la/Previous_102/Current/Current_Xekong.htm