ARMM basic literacy rate up

• Source: http://www.mb.com.ph/armm-basic-literacy-rate-up/
• Monday, November 16, 2015

By Nonoy E. Lacson

Zamboanga City – The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) registered a significant increase in its basic literacy rate from 82.5 percent in 2008 to 86.1 percent, based on the 2013 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority.

Marjuni Maddi, ARMM’s Education department (DepEd-ARMM) assistant secretary for academics, said the basic literacy survey is being used for “initial learning of reading and writing, which adults who have never been to school need to go through.” The region’s functional literacy rate also increased to 72.1 percent in 2013 from 71.6 percent in 2008.

Maddi credited the increase in the region’s basic literacy rate to efforts of the agency in solving literacy-related problems.

DepEd-ARMM is currently implementing ‘Abot-Alam’, a national program that aims at relocating “the out-of-school youth (OSY) nationwide who are 15 to 30 years old and who have not completed basic/higher education or who are unemployed, and to mobilize and harmonize programs, which will address these OSYs’ needs and aspirations.”

According to Maddi, the agency was also engaged in other interventions such as the Alterative Delivery Mode (ADM), a joint program with Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao-ARMM. ADM is being implemented by BRAC Philippines.

The program has established learning centers in poor, conflict-affected, and disadvantaged communities in the region to give out-of-school children access to basic education. It provides catch-up opportunities for young children in remote and deprived communities of the region where regular public education is not easily accessible.

The project already built 1,220 learning centers across ARMM including seven floating learning centers in coastal areas in the island provinces of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

These learning centers cater to 38,084 students from kindergarten to Grades 1 to 3.

Maddi encouraged everyone to take part in promoting the importance of education. “Education is everybody’s business. We should not leave it to our teachers,” he said.

The 2013 FLEMMS survey covered about 26,000 sample households in 1,600 Barangays in the country with about 1,200 sample households were taken from ARMM.