05 March 2010
	ADULT LITERACY The price of failure By David Furlonger

Illiteracy costs SA up to R550bn annually in potential gross domestic product, says a report by four Stellenbosch University academics. Accurately measuring the impact of illiteracy is difficult because it has so many definitions, says the report by Martin Gustafsson, Servaas van der Berg, Debra Shepherd and Cobus Burger. Various studies peg SA's adult literacy rate between 88% and 7%. The report says: "Policy makers and researchers should pay attention to how SA can obtain nationally representative, objective measures of adult literacy." It estimates the figure at a "plausible" 75%. The R550bn gap is based on the difference between what technically illiterate South Africans do earn and what they could if they had the skills. Literacy studies generally agree that the better the reading and writing skills, the better the chance of employment. Even the level of education plays a part. Learners with grade 12 have an 11 percentage-points better chance of employment than those with grade 11. Difficulties with finding jobs are worsened by stereotypes. "The reduction in one's probability of being employed associated with being female and African is high. Apart from labour market discrimination and problems in accessing employment-inducing social networks, a problem linked to the being-African variable is that the quality of schooling in historically African schools has tended to be poor." The report notes that job schemes should try to target rural areas. "Living in one of the six metropolitan areas in [SA] is associated with an increase in one's employment probability of eight percentage points."