September 8 is celebrated all over the world International Literacy Day, established on 17 November 1965 by UNESCO to recall the universal right to education and the importance of literacy as a source of rights and an engine of development.
Culture and literacy, equitable and inclusive education, are the prerequisites for improving people's lives, promoting awareness of their rights, respect for gender equality, offering the tools to combat poverty, infant mortality, violence. Literacy therefore understood in a broad sense, not only as education but as a tool for human and social progress.
This year's theme “Literacy for a Human-Centered Recovery: Bridging the Digital Divide” is particularly important because the pandemic has created enormous difficulties for education and training systems around the world, with school closures for over 1.6 billion students, increasing already existing inequalities in access to training and excluding from curricula about 773 million illiterate young people and adults.
As States General of Innovation we are engaged with our Italian and European partners in designing and promoting innovative educational and training projects, which aim to strengthen digital skills for people of all ages, from children to secondary school students up to adults.
The pandemic and the necessary distance learning on the one hand have made the great digital divide even more evident in terms of connectivity, infrastructure and knowledge of new technologies and tools. On the other hand, the health emergency has made clear the importance of digital literacy, both for young people and adults, of teaching digital skills as a necessary condition to be able to access fundamental services for people, for example in the Public Administration and to be able to take advantage of many health services. In short, to allow everyone to be an active part of a society which, due to a dramatic event such as the pandemic, has seen an acceleration of the digitization and technological innovation processes that were already underway but not so clearly visible to everyone.
September 8: International Literacy Day
