7: A Bilingual Literacy Program for Rural Women in Peru

In 2017, there were approximately 1.2 million people in Peru who were illiterate (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática [INEI], 2018). Of those, nearly 50% were rural women. The rate of illiteracy in rural areas was 17%, compared to 3.2% in urban areas. The regions with the highest rates of illiteracy had majority Quechua or other Indigenous populations. Furthermore, Indigenous Peruvians living in rural areas were more likely to be impoverished than any other population in any other region of the country (Podosek, 2017).

Between 2005 and 2014, Valdivia, with the support of Tierra de los Niños, a Peruvian non-governmental organization, developed a bilingual literacy program to teach rural women in the Andean department of Huancavelica, the poorest region in the country. The program’s principal aim was to develop the participants’ reading and writing skills in Quechua as a first language (L1) and Spanish as a second language (L2).

In this chapter, we detail the creation of the bilingual literacy program. We explain the program’s intentional design, aligned with Jose María Arguedas’s (1986) and Paulo Freire’s (1970) conceptions of education as knowledge, connection with culture, and connection with life itself. Beyond gaining literacy in both languages, the program promoted female self‑esteem, healthier relationships between men and women, and higher numbers of women in leadership. We share useful findings from the program’s success to support other bilingual literacy programs that seek to serve populations in areas where an ancestral language and Spanish co-exist.