Introduction: a reader, the empowered leader - examining the challenges

Abstract

The collection of papers in this special issue of PULA is a small sample of the proceedings of the Pan-African Reading-for-All conference whose theme was ‘A reader, the empowered leader’. At the conference, leadership was conceptualized as implying the individual’s active participation in a community’s literacy practices. Rather than using literacy to lead others in a literal sense, the literate individual leads an improved life by using literacy to understand his/her everyday existence.. The literate individual is empowered to understand, develop,and apply the skills, values and attitudes that are deemed valuable in the community. At the community level, empowerment links literacy to issues of “citizenship, cultural identity, socio-economic development,human rights and equity” (UNESCO 2004:7), and helps to “transform the lives of entire communities served by a nucleus of committed new literates[…] thus fructifying local knowledge and the employment of local languages” (Easton 1998:1). In the face of new technologies,literate individuals are also ‘multi-literate’ (Kasper 2000) in several ICT literacies. The conference reflected on all these issues. Similarly, as we approach the target date of 2015, set by the UN for the actualization of Education for All (EFA) (UN Report 2007), the conference presentations echoed the goal of EFA as an integral part of Literacy-for-All and Reading-for-All.