International Literacy Day, devoted this year to the connection between literacy and sustainable development, provides us with an opportunity to remember a simple truth: literacy not only changes lives, it saves them.
国际扫盲日今年的主题是扫盲与可持续发展的联系，它让我们想起一个简单的道理：扫盲改变生活，甚至拯救生命。
Literacy helps reduce poverty and enables people to find jobs and obtain higher salaries. It is one of the most efficient ways of improving the health of mothers and children, understanding doctors' prescriptions and gaining access to healthcare. The lives of more than two million children under the age of five were saved between 1990 and 2009 thanks to improvements in the education of women of reproductive age. Literacy facilitates access to knowledge and triggers a process of empowerment and self-esteem that benefits everyone. This energy, multiplied by millions of people, is essential to the future of societies.
扫盲可以减贫、谋职、提薪。它是改善母子健康、看懂医生处方或得到治疗的最有效途径之一。由于在育龄妇女教育方面取得的进步，1990至2009年间有二百多万五岁以下的儿童得以生命安康。扫盲利于获得知识，培养自立和自信，使所有人受益。众人拾柴所产生的这种能量承载着社会的未来。
Today, 781 million adults worldwide cannot read, write or count. Two thirds of them are women. More than 250 million children are unable to read a single sentence, even though half of them have spent four years in school. What kind of societies do we expect to build with an illiterate youth? This is not the kind of world we wish to live In. We want a world where everyone can participate in the destiny of their societies, gain access to knowledge and enrich it in turn. To succeed, we must also change the traditional approach of literacy programmes to encompass, beyond reading and writing in the narrower sense, broader skills with regard to consumption and sustainable lifestyles, the conservation of biodiversity, poverty reduction, disaster risk reduction as well as civic participation. In these ways, literacy programmes can unlock their full transformative potential.
今天世界上有7.81亿成年人不会读、写和计算，其中三分之二是妇女。有2.5亿多儿童连一个句子都读不下来，尽管他们中有一半人上过四年学。如果青年人目不识丁，我们还指望建设怎样的社会呢？这不是我们冀求的世界。我们冀求一个人人能够参与社会命运、获得知识并丰富知识的社会。若想成功，我们还应改变扫盲计划的传统方法，除了严格意义上的读写能力之外，还要培养在消费和可持续生活方式、生物多样性保护、减贫、降低灾害风险、公民参与等方面的更广泛的能力。只有这样扫盲计划才能释放出变革的潜能。
Commitment to these goals will be central to the forthcoming Aichi-Nagoya conference on education for sustainable development to be held in Japan this November. It will also be at the heart of the World Education Forum to be held next year in Incheon, Republic of Korea, to lead the global debate towards the adoption of new sustainable development goals at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. UNESCO is working across the world - in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and elsewhere - to ensure that literacy is integrated into national development strategies. The Global Partnership for Girls' and Women's Education and the Malala Fund for Girls' Right to Education, launched by UNESCO, also focus on literacy. The programmes acknowledged by the UNESCO-Confucius Prize for Literacy and the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize enable us each year to celebrate innovative practices that show that achievement is within our reach. New technologies, including mobile telephones, also offer freshopportunities for literacy for all. We must invest more, and I appeal to every Member State and all our partners to redouble efforts - political and financial - to ensure that literacy is fully recognized as one of the most powerful accelerators of sustainable development. The future we want starts with the alphabet.
该承诺将是11月在日本爱知县名古屋举办的下届可持续发展教育会议的中心议题，也是明年在大韩民国仁川举办的世界教育论坛的核心议题，论坛期间将展开全球讨论，争取在2015年的联合国大会上通过新的可持续发展目标。在阿富汗、孟加拉国、柬埔寨、埃及、尼日利亚、塞内加尔以及别的国家，教科文组织奔走于世界各地，将扫盲纳入各国的发展战略中。教科文组织发起的"女童和妇女教育全球伙伴关系"和马拉拉女童教育权基金也以扫盲为重点。教科文组织孔子奖和教科文组织世宗国王奖的奖励计划每年表彰一些被证明行之有效的创新做法。新技术，特别是移动电话也为全民扫盲提供了新的可能性。我们在这方面应加大投入，借此扫盲日之机，我呼吁所有会员国和所有合作伙伴在政治和财政上加倍付出，使人人认识到扫盲是可持续发展的最强大推动力之一。我们冀望的未来始于识字。
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