South-South Development Cooperation: Cuba's Yes, I Can! Adult Literacy model in Timor-Leste and Aboriginal Australia

Low levels of adult literacy in a nation's official language(s) have long been recognised as a major barrier to the achievement of local and national development goals, and mass adult literacy campaigns have proven an effective way to overcome this problem. Following their own successful mass campaign in 1961, Cuba began helping many other countries run similar campaigns. Over time, Cuban adult educators developed an innovative campaign model which could be adapted to specific country contexts, and has now been deployed in 30 countries around the world reaching over 9 million people. In the last decade, the Cuban model, now called "Yes, I Can!" ("Yo, Si Puedo" in Spanish) has been used successfully in Timor-Leste with over 20,000 participating adults. It is now running in five remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. The authors of this paper worked on the Timor-Leste campaign with a team of Cuban advisers and Timorese nationals from 2006 to 2012, and began using the model in Australia in 2012. In this paper, we describe the model and how it has worked in these two different contexts, presenting evidence of the campaign's impact on the people and communities who have participated. Cuba's unique model of south-south education cooperation will be of interest to Pacific Islands educators and policy makers, who may also be struggling with the challenges of low levels of literacy among some sectors of their adult populations.