ASSENY: All ages. But young people, the young women, are at a very low level because they have shied away. The way I see it. When you are young, you say to yourself that literacy is not something one can easily use.

JOAN: Do you try to use popular education methods in your literacy classes? Is that something you looked at in your report?

PATRICIA: We don't use the term popular education, we say functional literacy. In other words literacy works to help people in their daily lives. We started out with literacy and then come to the question of liberation - education for women's liberation. People work for change to get control over their own environment. Now the emphasis is much more on development of skills which will help people economically. The education program has not been able to reach that point. And this is what I'd like to add to what Asseny said. Adult education wants to give women economic power, that is true, but it also has to help in problem solving, in control of resources and in promoting the role of women in decision-making. In our research we have identified three major constraints for women. One is the traditional division of labor; women become over-burdened because they are responsible for social as well as agricultural production. The second is allocation of resources; the present education and outreach systems are geared toward men, toward cash crops in agricultural and control of resources; the technological research being done isn't helping women with their subsistence crops.

    The women are still using hoes; the tractor is used for other forms of crop production and also to control resources at the family level. It is the man who controls the cash flow. And the woman, even if she is producing from her fields or from livestock that she takes care of every day, does not control the cash income. The third issue is the subordinate status of women, in particular in relation to decision-making in the family. The man makes the major decisions about the direction of the family and about what kind of land is going to be used for what kind of produce - how the labor process is going to be organized. On a village council of 12 you may find only two women and these may not be vocal up to the regional and the national level. Now if you only talk about giving women economic power you have not yet grappled with some of the basic problems - general questions of empowerment. How are the women going to be able to control these resources?

    The concrete proposals we made for changes in the curriculum would deal with decision-making and allocation of resources - with how a family will manage its own resources and who will have input into textbooks or primers.

    There should also be supplementary materials which deal with specific women's issues - family planning, consciousness raising to help women to get confidence in their ability and to increase their determination to speak out about how to find channels of communication even at the village level. I'm not quite happy with focusing only on the question of economics and power because without the other tools economic empowerment doesn't mean much.

JOAN: Is this analysis reflected in the report?

PATRICIA: Yes, aside from commercial skills, accounting, book-keeping, project management as in developing a small project, and discussion of how men and women should talk about how decisions are made in allocating family resources. This is aimed at helping women, by supporting their having more voice in family decisions. We hope to be able to manage to restructure and re-orient towards co-operative decision-making.

JOAN: Was the report country-wide?

PATRICIA: We were aiming at changing national policy. We were not able to undertake a survey of the whole country but we worked in four different regions. We broke up into four teams and went to one district within each of the four regions. There are 17 regions in Tanzania. We didn't have the resources or time to do more. We tried to be representative; we chose some urban, some rural, some agricultural.

JOAN: How do you think the state will respond to the report?

PATRICIA: It was done through the Ministry of Education which is, of course, a government ministry. They have said that these recommendations now need to be implemented. So we gave some concrete suggestions for general changes. Before us now is the development of materials and this job still has to be done. We're hoping it will be done soon.

JOAN: Did you find the state receptive to suggestions for the betterment of women?

PATRICIA: Well, it's definitely a policy priority. The government is committed to uplifting the status of women so that women will be equal. This perception of inequality between men and women has been government policy since the Arusha declaration. But at present women do more than their fair share. It's a question of implementation and realizing the implications of policy decisions on women at each stage and in each sector. Because if you don't have a group that will make this kind of decision you just go on the way things have been happening. People need to be aware and sensitive to gender issues.