Learning for Community Empowerment Programme (LCEP-2) OVERVIEW
Afghanistan’s literacy rate, particularly among women, is one of the lowest in the world. In rural areas, 90 percent of women and 63 percent of men cannot read or write. The population has almost no accumulated assets or resources to enable them to take the first steps out of poverty. To date, no strategy has addressed these inter-related concerns: the lack of literacy and numeracy skills, productive skills, and an approach to savings and investment on a wide scale. The goal of Learning for Community Empowerment Programme (LCEP-2) is to contribute to a sustainable process through a community economic empowerment and educational program that integrates literacy and numeracy education, productive skills and business development skills training, and establishment of self help groups for savings and investment. FACTS
LCEP-2 project be implemented in 2,766 rural and 2,766 urban communities in 20 provinces.
Donor: USAID total cost: USD 40 million.
Operator: UN-HABITAT is providing support to the National Literacy Centre, Ministry of Education to implement this programme.
Some 312,000 older youth and adults will benefit from the programme of which 60 percent will be women.
The beneficiaries will be organized in 12,480 learning and self help groups as a community-based foundation and strengthen the receiving structure for the support to be provided in literacy, community banking and productive skills. BENEFITS
LCEP-2 programme addresses two priorities identified in Afghanistan’s National Education Strategy Plan: the establishment of a National Literacy Center to build capacity within the Ministry of Education and the roll-out of a large-scale educational initiative.
The project will provide support to establish and train National Literacy Center staff at the district, provincial and national level for the support, management, and oversight of the programme. It will also develop new learning materials corresponding to needs identified by rural communities. It will strengthen community capacity to mange the programme through 15,600 self-help groups in 3,120 community learning centres and 1,800 community banks to initiate 30,000 new productive skills activities conducted by 6,240 village facilitators. RESULTS
As of April 2009 beneficiaries in 994 communities in 32 districts in 20 provinces are participating in the programme. Already, 3,916 learning centers have been established – sixty percent of them for women. Some 95,7oo beneficiaries are participating in the programme. A total of 2,838 self-help groups have collected group savings of AFN 1.2 million (USD 23,000), over 70 percent of it from women members. A total 2,239 village facilitators are managing the programme, more than half of them women. A support team has been established at the National Literacy Centre, Ministry of Education, to strengthen the staff capacity, develop learning materials integrating literacy, numeracy, community banking, and productive skills.
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