What South America countries have the lowest literacy rates? What are the main reasons for this?
South American countries have pretty high literacy rates. The whole continent has between 80-100%, Columbia and Brazil being the lower end of that. Latin America has countries with lower rates: Nicaraugua, Honduras and Guatemala are all 50-70%. Although in some individual cases it results from disabilities, illiteracy on a large scale ultimately results from a neglect of socio-economic development. “Surveys carried out between the 1970s and 1980s, allowed comparisons to be made between the groups of people studied. This pointed to a compounding of difficulties as people with poor basic skills get older. The greater labour market problems of the younger cohort in the late 1980s, meant that many more of them never experienced proper employment. The research described in the previous section shows this trend to be cyclical for those caught in it. There is a vicious circle of disadvantage and marginalisation associated with basic skills problems which begins in early childhood. The child’s
