HAVANA, Cuba, Nov 11 (acn) Salvadoran Education Minister, Salvador Sanchez, said he was confident in the success of an ongoing national literacy campaign, which is based on the “Yes, I can” Cuban learning method.

Sanchez, also vice-president of this Central American nation, told Prensa Latina news agency that there are more than 8,000 volunteers working on the program that aims at getting thousands of people out of ignorance and illiteracy.

He added that there is a moral debt with thousands of Salvadoran citizens that can not read or write; a sector of the population that is excluded and marginalized from the national development.

One of the historic leaders of the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), Sanchez, pointed out that El Salvador has an illiteracy rate of 17.9%, which is equivalent to 682 399 people –among them, 420 000 women, the most affected sector of the population.
 
In addition, he said that this project intends to reduce that rate to 4% by the end of this administration term, on May 31, 2014.

He informed that right now there are 39,808 people learning to read and write in more than 8,000 literacy circles.
 
Moreover, Guatemalan Education Minister Dennis Alonzo said that the “Yes, I can” method, put into practice since 2007 in his country, is one of the eight methods used by the National Literacy Council and is the more efficient one taking into account its techniques and results.

He also mentioned that by means of the Cuban method 65,464 citizens learned to read and write in Guatemala; out of that figure, 52,495 people have done it this year.

Source: Cuba News Agency