Our thread on e-villages in rural Asia has attracted two more comments from Sri Lanka . One of them points out that all the computers in the world won’t make Sri Lankan farmers literate in English. The answer, his web site argues, is not to bring English lessons to more Sri Lankans. This will threaten local languages, history and culture. Instead, he says, Sinhala and Tamil need to be updated through the implementation of “character allocation tables.”
Or perhaps IT aid programmes could include a budget for language translation software? This appears to be widely available.
We’ve also had an update from the Sri Lankan government’s side of the debate. It’s clear that English lessons are key to its push to bring IT literacy to the country. Does that need to be so? It’s certainly not the case in China.
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April 12, 2007 at 3:36 am
serviceunavailable
This is just to reiterate that I’m not representing the Sri Lankan Government in anyway. Just an individual interested in ICT. That’s all.
April 12, 2007 at 9:44 am
ANN
Yes, rural farmers in many of Asia’s developing countries (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, etc) do not speak English. But avoiding English is a bit wrong-headed. A few thoughts:
- Sri Lanka is something like 94% literate. Most of those capabilities are in Tamil and Sinhala, which is wonderful, but tough when SL wants to communicate with the rest of the world. The unfortunate truth, however, is that many of the literate (even in the countryside) could also read English 30 years ago. That changed due to the implementation of nationalist education policies. This is an understandable post-colonial nation building move, but unfortunately results in inward focus rather than outward international engagement. The justification that farmers can’t read English, therefore they should only have access to Sinhala and Tamil on PCs will sadly keep the farmers disengaged and unaware of what their colleagues are doing in other countries, unaware of international farming prices, etc.
- Much of the information on development issues (women’s and children’s health, vocational training, etc) is in the English language. In order for NGOs, aid agencies and multilateral institutions to translate new material into Sinhala, they must incur significant cost. Therefore, rural Sri Lankans have quite a lot of old materials.
- Nonetheless, USAID, the Dutch aid agency and others are allocating funds for development of local language programmes because they understand the lag in language capability.
- International aid agencies like DFID, Ausaid, USAID, etc push English language training because they see that it adds a net positive impact to society and the economy. For example, there is a movement in Sri Lanka now to start BPOs in some communities. This will be very difficult with the limited English proficiency (and proficiency in languages besides Sinhala and Tamil).
- IT programmes are typically most highly utilised by the young. It’s critical that the young learn English in order to achieve economic and social mobility.