Aims of CLCs

The aim of a CLC is to empower individuals and promote community development through life-long education for all people in the community, including adults, youth and children of all ages. The main beneficiaries of a CLC should be people with less opportunities for education, for example, pre-school children, out-of-school children, women, youth, and the elderly.

 

 

Location of CLCs

A CLC can be set up in different compounds in the community, as long as the facility is easily accessible to all people in the community. The CLC doesn’t necessary require new infrastructures, but the use of existing buildings should be explored such as health centre, temple, mosque, primary school.

 

 

Functions of CLCs

The CLC can function as the venue for education and training, resource and information centre, various development activities in the community and community networking. The activities should be flexible and participatory. It should allow for leadership to emerge from any member of the community, while support mechanisms should also be made available through strengthened coordination, networking and partnership.

 

 

Lessons learned from the implementation of CLCs

The CLC participating countries undertook case studies during 2001 – 2002 and reported both positive impact and difficulties as future challenges through the implementation of CLCs.  The following is a brief summary of these findings.  The section 'CLC Profiles in Asia-Pacific Region' provides details on country specific activities while the section 'Sustainability of CLCs' further discusses them through the viewpoint of sustainability.

 

Positive impact

•  As a community based organization, a CLC has invited community people to participate in the process of decision making regarding the content of activities in the centre.  An ownership of programmes may be stressed as a unique feature of CLCs comparing with other literacy or training classes.
• Accordingly, CLCs have served commonly agreed interests decided through collective action by community members.  While organizing educational activities as an entry point, CLCs are holistic and multipurpose organizations, covering socio, economic and cultural aspects in the community.
• In particular, most CLCs start the activities to meet immediate needs of the community and people in such areas as life skills, income generation through small scale enterprise, health, culture and recreation.  It makes positive contributions toward poverty alleviation, improving the quality of life and building the confidence of community people, especially of the poor.
• At the same time, a CLC can not arrange all kinds of activities in its premises due to the limited space and resources.  Creation of a network and developing coordination mechanisms among different sectors in the community is important for successful CLCs.  Networks have been established with external agencies in many CLCs that can provide technical interventions to improve the operation of CLCs.
• Some CLCs are set up in remote areas where there is no learning place for community people. In this case, CLCs have functioned as the tangible symbol of the community and facilitated lifelong learning including activities for youth and adults as well as early childhood care and primary schooling for younger children who can not walk to a school located far away.
• Some countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, Uzbekistan and Vietnam have included CLCs as important strategies under the EFA national plans towards 2015.

 

Challenges

Future challenges in CLCs may be summarized as follows:

• Resources in terms of human, material and financial aspects are still limited in many CLCs.  Systematic approaches and continuous efforts for resource mobilizations and generations are needed.
• Status of CLC personnel is low in general, and so the work of CLCs is considered as a temporary job.  Many CLCs depend on the volunteerism of local people, which sometimes become too much burden for them.
• Linkages and coordination within the community and with outside agencies are needed to strengthen CLCs.  Efforts need to be made on this not only at the community level but also district and national levels.
• Participation of community people in CLC operations is not always voluntary with strong ownership.  Participation of disadvantaged groups in the decision making process needs to be ensured.  For example, women are often the recipients of services in CLCs only, and not part of the decision making process.
• Since CLCs formulate action plans based on the local needs, the activities are often limited to the ones to accommodate the immediate needs.  Through appropriate interventions of local government and NGOs, developmental issues such as legal matters, human right, environment, etc. should be included in activities in the long-run.
• Political, financial, technical support and monitoring and evaluation are needed to be further developed more systematically as part of the NFE programme rather than time/budget bound projects.
  

UNESCO’s support to CLCs

Since CLCs are local institutions in the community, participating countries have developed diverse and context specific activities that are suitable to the local community.  Meanwhile, UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education, through APPEAL, has supported CLCs in various ways, which may be summarized in the following three aspects:

1. as a regional programme;
2. as a specialized agency; and,
3. as an inter-governmental organization.

 

1. Role as a regional programme

The CLC project, as inter-country initiatives, has been carried out through joint planning and review by the participating countries.  APPEAL, as a regional programme, has promoted inter-country exchanges through various means including meetings, training workshops, publications and other medias including Asia-Pacific Literacy Database developed by ACCU and APPEAL. 

These activities have provided the CLC participating countries with opportunities to review their activities and develop innovative strategies by sharing the experiences each other where APPEAL has functioned as a catalyst. 

The regional network has been promoted with partner institutions.  In particular, APPEAL Resource and Training Consortium (ARTC) and ACCU’s Literacy Resource Centres (LRCs) have supported CLCs in cooperation with APPEAL. 

 

2.  Role as a specialized agency

Education is one of the specialized areas of UNESCO.  The expertise accumulated by APPEAL in basic education has provided strong backstopping to the CLC project.

 

While APPEAL mainly focused national level curriculum and training programmes in early 1990, its focus has been expanded to community based programmes like CLCs since late 1990’s based on the recommendations of the evaluation on APPEAL’s programmes conducted in 1997.  Accordingly, technical support of APPEAL to the member states has also been shifted to practical areas targeting NFE personnel at the grassroots level.  The areas of resource development were focused on: grassroots based materials development, capacity building of NFE facilitators and strengthening planning and management of CLCs.  Handbooks on these areas were developed by drawing up real experiences of NFE activities in the countries of the region.

 

Using the above handbooks as the main resource materials, training programmes have been carried out in the member states during the second half of 2001 to 2002. APPEAL, in cooperation with members of ARTC and LRC have provided technical support for assisting in organizing the training programmes based on the specific needs and requirement of each country.  Furthermore, new and innovative tools are currently being developed by APPEAL’s regional project on ICT for NFE such as MANGO and computer software for CLCs.

 

APPEAL’s activities concerning capacity building of CLC personnel are elaborated in the section Sustainability of CLCs.

 

3. Role as an inter-governmental agency

APPEAL’s interventions in the CLC project are now shifting from technical aspects at the pilot phase to the policy level discussions for institutionalizing CLCs as part of the national NFE strategies under EFA.  In order to disseminate the CLC approaches, APPEAL has supported some member states such as Bangladesh and Mongolia to undertake an evaluation of CLCs to identify both strengths and weaknesses of the project, which can be shared with government organizations and NGOs as concrete evidences of community based NFE delivery mechanisms.

 

UNESCO has promoted CLCs through various international seminars and other forums.  As a concrete example of such efforts, the UN Literacy Decade (2003 – 2012) suggests community participation as one of the strategies of the Decade including an establishment of CLCs.