The Literacy Deficit is Guyana’s True Barrier to Growth and Development

Jul 13, 2025 Features / Columnists, News

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By Karen Abrams, MBA, AA, Doctoral Candidate

Kaieteur News – Recently, while sitting in an office, I watched a young man, no older than 25, struggle to copy his first name from his ID onto the signature line of an application form. The clerk, seemingly exasperated, tore up the form six times. I felt sadness, but more than that, I felt alarm. Here was a young adult who had clearly passed through the education system yet emerged without the most basic skill required to navigate modern life.

What I witnessed is not an isolated event but a symptom of a deep-rooted crisis. The Ministry of Education’s own Education Statistical Digest (2020–2021) paints a worrying picture, a 2021 diagnostic assessment of our nursery school children revealed that by the end of their second year, only 14.7% were reading at the expected level. Just 36.9% demonstrated the required numeracy skills. This means the vast majority of our children are entering primary school already significantly behind, and 2nd, 4th and 6th grade assessment results reveal that the students are not catching up.

This failure to build a strong foundation has profound consequences, because literacy is the key that unlocks imagination, sharpens communication, and builds the self-confidence needed to thrive. It is the cornerstone of all other learning. A student who cannot read with fluency in Grade 2 won’t easily grasp a science experiment, solve a math word problem, or understand a historical text. The struggle ripples outward, creating a learning deficit that widens with each passing year, making it nearly impossible to recover.

The inverse is also true, the benefits of strong literacy are immense. It is the foundational skill that makes learning every other subject possible. The cognitive advantages are lifelong, building stronger memory, focus, and even delaying cognitive decline in adulthood. More importantly, it allows for a safer, healthier, and more prosperous society.

Last year, I had a severe allergic reaction and was rushed to the emergency room. A nurse came in with two vials of medication and, unassisted, carefully measured and drew just one-third of one vial and a fraction of the second. Watching her, I thought about numeracy. What if she had miscalculated? In a health emergency, basic math is a life-saving skill. This is the reality we often ignore when we suggest that children struggling academically can simply enter a technical or vocational field.

That assumption is dangerously false. Germany, a global model for technical education, emphasizes strong literacy and numeracy before any student is admitted to a vocational programme. Modern factory equipment is computer-driven, and technical workers must read manuals, analyze data, and make precise calculations as part of their daily routine (Hampf & Woessmann, 2017). Even our police officers will need these skills to do their jobs well. As law enforcement agencies around the world integrate drones, data science, AI and other technologies, officers who cannot interpret data will render these sophisticated tools useless.

This brings us to the immense cost of our literacy deficit, not just to individuals, but to our entire national development plan. For the private sector, a workforce with low functional literacy and numeracy is a direct tax on productivity. It translates into higher costs for recruitment and on-the-job training, increased workplace errors, and a smaller, less adaptable talent pool. As Guyana aims to build new hotels, hospitals, and tech hubs, our progress is throttled by a simple, undeniable bottleneck, we are not producing enough workers who can read, write, and calculate at the level required for the development of a modern economy. The problem therefore is beyond education, it is in fact an economic problem, and one that makes us less competitive and puts a low ceiling on our potential.

As an organizational leader, I feel this crisis in practical terms. I am in the pool of those employers competing fiercely for the limited number of competent, literate, and numerate workers available. The challenge we face is immense.

Solving this issue won’t be easy.  International studies show that achieving even a small but meaningful improvement in student performance across an entire system is incredibly difficult and expensive (Kraft, 2020; Slavin, 2021). The most effective interventions, like high-dosage tutoring, often require intensive, individualized support that is impossible in a traditional classroom of 25 or 30 students (Nickow et al., 2020). A single teacher, no matter how dedicated, cannot effectively teach a class where some students are struggling with addition, others with multiplication, some with decimals, and others are ahead, while also being expected to deliver the full curriculum and meet standardized achievement targets.

While schools bear a heavy responsibility, the solution cannot begin and end at the classroom door. Global best practices show that parental involvement is one of the most powerful drivers of student achievement. Parents can build a strong foundation at home, often with simple, no-cost activities. Reading to a child for just 15 minutes a day, talking about the pictures and asking questions about the story, is one of the most effective ways to build vocabulary and comprehension. For numeracy, parents can engage in “math talk” during everyday routines, counting items at the market, sorting laundry by color, or measuring ingredients while cooking. These practices create a language-rich and numeracy-aware environment that makes formal schooling far more effective.

Given that we lack enough trained teachers even to meet the demands of the 1 teacher to 20 students classroom ratio, we certainly do not have the resources to scale the individualized attention learners desperately need to improve their academic outcomes.  The only scalable solution is the effective use of technology, not just computers, but structured, adaptive (effective) learning tools that can help one teacher manage a class of diverse learners. We need parents paying close attention at home and beyond government investment, we need a national culture of volunteerism. Every literate citizen must consider helping a child or an adult learn to read.

Guyana’s future depends not only on oil, infrastructure, or foreign investment. It depends on whether the next generation can read, write, and count. If we don’t solve this now, in our homes and in our schools, then all our ambitions will be built on shaky foundations.

 

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• Barrier, Development, Growth, Literacy Deficit

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