Abstract:

Since the years of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs ) and Education For All (EFA), various development agendas, strategies, and action plans have been established on education and many of them have been implemented with a particular focus on literacy and non-formal education. Particularly, literacy is significant since it is a first step on the ladder to human development, and accordingly, most countries have endeavored to develop sound literacy systems by strengthening national capacities on literacy development. Further, donor countries have sought to meet the requirements of development agendas such as EFA and MDGs by scaling up the quality, inclusive, and gender-oriented literacy projects in marginalized regions of developing countries and this contributed to the poverty reduction and gender empowerment in development contexts. However, some challenging issues and limitations of literacy development still remain and this raises a question about the future directions for further development on literacy.

In accordance with this international trend on literacy education, NGOs in Korea and Burkina Faso have collaborated on poverty alleviation in Burkina Faso through diverse activities on literacy development for a decade and the collaborative works have brought about substantial achievements. Meanwhile, both NGOs also confronted limitations and challenging issues at field level. Both achievements and limitations became the foundation for the research background and significance of this study and they will be analyzed by field observations, in-depth interviews, and literature reviews from below.

Keywords:

Literacy, non-formal education, human development, gender empowerment, poverty alleviation.