Today, with over 860 million illiterate adults and over 100 million children without access to schooling, as well as an equally large number who drop out before literacy is properly acquired, the goal of universal literacy continues to be an immensely challenging task for the world community. Consequently the United Nations Literacy Decade (UNLD) was launched in February 2003, in order to reinforce and scale up national and international efforts towards ensuring that access to learning and literacy becomes a reality for all. While the Decade is focused on the realization of the six goals contained in the Dakar Framework for Action: Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments, emphasis is placed on Goals 3 and 4, i.e equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programmes for all young people and adults as well as 50% improvement in adult literacy by 2015.

In this regard, to scale up the good literacy practices and for maximizing their outreach, the Decade Plan of Actions has identified the i) development and expansion of flexible literacy programmes as well as ii) capacity building of literacy providers, amongst its major areas of action. Therefore, within the Decade framework, UNESCO has planned inter-country and interregional consultations. The purpose of these consultations is to foster the sharing of proven experiences in meeting adequately the learning needs of diverse illiterate population groups as well as in creating lifelong learning opportunities. In addition, review of existing national and regional training modules and resource packages are foreseen for drawing on successful training programmes to develop a framework for an international resource package, with adaptable training modules for different categories of literacy providers. Furthermore, sub-regional and regional training workshops are envisaged to facilitate a rapid dissemination of the resource package and its adaptation to each country's capacity building requirements for scaling up literacy programmes.

To this end, UNESCO in collaboration with ISESCO, has decided to organise a five day regional workshop, from 26 to 30 September 2004, in Dakar, Senegal. The objective of this workshop is to identify good literacy practices in Africa in order to develop a framework of a resource package for capacity building of literacy facilitators. The participating countries shall be invited to send one representative each, preferably the person who is responsible in the respective countries for developing and planning literacy and NFE programmes. The participants will be requested to bring documents on and examples of proven good literacy practices to share and discuss during the 5-day long workshop. The expected result of the workshop is the development, based on the existing good practices, of an adaptable a resource package framework, which can be easily disseminated for scaling up literacy programmes.

In this regard, it is important to note that to reinforce and maximise outreach of literacy interventions, particularly for women who constitute 62% of the illiterate population, a new initiative entitled LIFE (Literacy Initiative For the Excluded) is being launched by UNESCO. The focus of this initiative will be on 32 priority countries which either have an adult literacy rate below 50% or countries with an illiterate adult population over 10 million.

The Dakar workshop will focus on the 17 countries in Africa which fall in the priority group of countries having over 50% or over 10 million illiterate adult population. These countries are the following: Benin, Burkina Faso Burundi Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Rep. Of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau. Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone.