City proclaims September 5 to 11 as International Literacy Week

Swift Current City Council again provided a boost to the importance of literacy by proclaiming International Literacy Week in the community.

International Literacy Week was observed in Swift Current on September 5 to 11, with the formal proclamation made at City Council’s September 7 meeting.

Bula Ghosh, Southwest Literacy Committee member and Literacy Coordinator at Great Plains College shared during a presentation that COVID provided an unexpected hurdle to literacy efforts around the world over the past number of months. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) highlighted these concerns by choosing “Literacy For A Human Centred Recovery: Narrowing the Digital Divide” as the theme for the 2021 International Literacy Week.

“The COVID-19 crisis in the past year has brought forward the inequalities of access to learning opportunities to the forefront, particularly in digital literacy. These days we are referring to it as the digital divide between the fortunate and less fortunate in our community, in our nation and in the world,” Ghosh said during the September 7 council meeting.

She noted that there are an estimated 773 million non literate young people around the globe who have been impacted by the digital divide, but that Canada is not immune to the pandemic’s impact on literacy.

“In a developed country like Canada we also got effected because even today there are households that have no digital device or internet access,” she noted. “This lack of access to digital resources is widening the socio economic gap. If this inequity is not addressed in the long run it will stunt the growth of our GDP, deepen the crisis of worker shortage, and effect the mental and social wellbeing of all people.”

Katherine Foley, Director of the Chinook Regional Library, explained to council that the Swift Current Library remained focussed on literacy despite the impacts of COVID.

“We’re doing a lot of different things to celebrate literacy, and it is a focal point of what we do with most of our program. We concentrate on connecting people to technology. We have up to 80-plus one-on-one sessions a month, and growing. That was one of the services we first put back when we started curb-side service, we were also giving access to computer and printing service to our community members through the library. Because it’s so important to be able to connect to all of the things that technology now denies certain people.”

In addition to curb side pickup of books when the library was closed by COVID, they found a way to provide internet access, one of the other key services they provide to the community.

“We also kept all our library’s wifi on all the way through the closure. You could go by the library and see people sitting in the gardens and in their vehicles connected to out wifi, so we know how important we are.”

“It was a heart rending time, but there were silver linings to the clouds that we learnt about that I’m really proud of.”

“The physical items are still very important to people, and certainly for children. I feel that it’s so important to sit on somebody’s knee and get read to. That’s where literacy and the love of the spoken word and the written word comes from. And it’s alive and well in Saskatchewan, but we still have to keep spreading it because we certainly know that our literacy levels could always climb.”