Issues and Challenges of Adult Basic Literacy Education in the 21st Century in Nigeria

This paper discusses issues and challenges of adult basic literacy education practice in the 21st century in Nigerian. Adult basic literacy education is one of the foremost programmes of adult education as profession. It was programmed to provide reading, numeracy, skill acquisition skills etc. to the adults’ illiterates of the both sex in our society, that will enhance socio-economic, cultural, political, psychological needs and raise fortune of the citizenries in order to revert or strengthen the desire to eradicate illiteracy for better development and growth of the nation. Also, the world now is a global village due largely to innovations and developments in ICT, which has made lifelong learning and literacy education very important and relevant in
individual and natural development. This is the reason why policy makers in education and adult education in the past recognized adult basic literacy education as a veritable tool for conscientization, sensitization, enlightenment, awareness creation to awakening the inmate potentials of the individuals and reposition them to overcome other dangerous plagues of life in terms of poverty, disease, pain, ignorance, unemployment, etc. in human nature. But in as much as literacy education was projected to do all these, it become very imperative to note that the sector has been really under equipped and not given appropriate attention to satisfy this mandate of the past is the crux of the discussion of this paper. Secondly, discussions on this subject matter is in respect to the issues and challenges of the sector, as enshrined in UNESCO and CONFINTEA V guidelines reports on the following headlines; policy, governance, finance, participation, inclusive and quality was applied in order to address the issues of literacy education as required at the global context. This paper re-echoes the need to ensure that the original mandates were achieved in the new era of the 21st century by pointing out important aspects of the issues and challenges and make recommendations that will assist in returning back the glory of literacy education in Nigeria.