International Literacy Day 2019; Literacy and Multilingualism
Today, the Ministry of Education launched International Literacy Day 2019 which focused on ‘Literacy and Multilingualism.’ The day is celebrated annually and gives governments, civil society and stakeholders the opportunity to highlight improvements in literacy rates and to reflect on literacy challenges. The official launch was held at the Marion Jones Sports Complex in Belize City and a special event was held later at Unity Presbyterian Primary School where Minister of Education Patrick Faber spoke to the media. According to Faber, enhancing the literacy rate among children is the responsibility of everyone.
Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
“It is not only reading and writing. It is also financial literacy. It is also numeracy as well. All of these things are very important for our children but also for our adults and we push those things because they are big on our agenda for Belize’s development.”
Hipolito Novelo
“What does this mean for our children sir, because they are a huge stakeholder in terms of literacy.”
Patrick Faber
Patrick Faber
“Yea. It means, of course a stronger start for them and much of our intervention is done at the very early stage. We have seen where sometimes our children get to the end of primary school and they start high school even and they are not as strong as they ought to be and so we decided when we started to push literacy as a national issue to start the interventions much earlier. So, if our children do not get the strong start in infant one or infant two then we put in place intervention measures to ensure that they get that strong start because it starts from the bottom. Of course our partners, Digi and Pathlight came along with us to make some very valuable donations. We donated computers today, we donated books, we donated support materials for the teachers for use in their classroom as well. So, this is just but one segment of our celebrations for literacy day and one small portion of our greater push in the wider Ministry of Education to advance education across Belize.”
