Why Should I Care? Counting Up from Survival
Posted on March 11, 2026
The top three questions I get about Reading the World and its mission—to address school deserts, places where kids have limited or no access to education—are the following:
o Why Africa?
o Why not America?
o Why should I care?
The first two, I think, are self-evident, and my responses remain consistent. The third, however, evokes connections among pragmatic, ethical, and epistemological stances contextualized in an erased and obscured history.
It’s complex.
Answering in casual conversation has tripped me up, mostly because I give in to conflict avoidance and white fragility and retreat to pat economics (I list them at the end).
It is a failure I want to address.
Here is my answer.
It will make you feel uncomfortable. Sorry not sorry.
My advice: lean into it.
first: Why Africa?
Africa has the lowest literacy rates in the world (Unesco, 2017). All but four of the countries with the lowest literacy rates are in sub-Saharan Africa. Note also that Africa is in the midst of a massive population boom—doubling over the next fifty years—which will only intensify the data.
second: Why not America?
I spent thirty-six years in CT public, clinical, and higher education service as a teacher, instructor, and administrator. I built one of the most effective reading recovery systems for secondary students in the state. I continue to mentor, consult, write, attend, and speak about American literacy education at conferences. I invested—and sacrificed—my career making literacy education better and more accessible to kids in America. I am still doing it.
America knows what to do. It doesn’t have the will to do it.
the big one: Why should I care?
First, let me make some presumptions about who is asking this question.
1. You are not black or brown.
2. You are educated. It was always assumed you would complete secondary school; there’s a good chance you are second- or third-generation post-secondary trained.
3. You, your parents, and maybe even your grandparents own(ed) a home or are actively saving for one.
4. More than 95% of the roads and bridges you travel on are paved and maintained for emergency services.
5. You have access to quality food and medicine near your home.
6. You enjoy regular phone and computer network service.
7. You live and work in buildings constructed in accordance with standardized safety codes that include electrical service and potable water/plumbing.
8. You plan for your future—economically, socially, educationally, and career advancement.
If my presumptions are correct on most of these markers of generational wealth and products of the industrial revolution, you are living off the benefits of enslaved African labor.
Your, our, ancestors reaped the rewards, and they were passed along to us. Even if you are from later stock, your benefits are no less evident. You always have an advantage; you are always a step or two ahead of black and brown people.
Your participation in this system is called implicit bias. You don’t have to know it or believe it; you just live it.
This is called privilege.
But here is the crux of the issue related to why literacy in Africa matters to us: we have never paid back what we stole. We made a mess, and we need to clean it up.
Where we subjugate populations to improve our own lifestyles, we must repair the damage.
Where we take without compensation, we must install reparations.
Where we adopt selfishness over selflessness, we must redistribute.
In localities all across America children are born into deficit zip codes where education, nutrition, and healthcare are decidedly less accessible than others. In nations all over the world, children are born into regions that offer little or no access to education because progress was stymied at their borders.
We benefit; they do not.
Moreover, this is not past history. We are still complicit to pilfering of Africa’s resources today.
Colonization 2.0.
All but two nations in Africa were violently coerced into colonial rule in the “scramble for Africa” (Ethiopia and Liberia). Independence from colonizers is relatively recent (Ghana was the first to achieve independence in 1957). But that doesn’t mean colonialism is gone.
Remnants remain. It is especially pronounced in the education systems, which favor competition over collectivism, individual conquest over cooperation, and self-interest over community compassion. The implicit curriculum enforces submission and acceptance of inferiority and dependence on authoritarian rule.
In Africa as it is in America.
But in Africa, the plunder hasn’t stopped.
Colonialism there works like the Lernaean Hydra—chop off one head and two grow back:
· African nations seeking trade and loans today are often subject to International Monetary Fund and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that require governments to devalue their currencies (London School of Economics, 2024). SAPs guarantee the investment returns are high for lenders and purchased goods are cheap for profiteers.
· African nations spend about nine times more on loan servicing debts than education compared to wealthy countries.
· Development aid is falling (think USAID cuts); the annual shortfall to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals sits at $1.3 trillion. And it is rising.
· Western corporations own most of the mining production in Africa (72%).
· Western corporations repatriate profits to home nations or investor portfolios, not the nation of origin.
· Millions of acres of arable African land are purchased and turned into single-crop plantations in exchange for carbon credits of polluting nations, displacing and limiting the capacity of local inhabitants.
Under these conditions, it is unlikely African nations can attain even footing with Western nations. And, I think, that is the intent.
But the consequences for kids are dire. And they are dire for us as well as Africans.
Consequences and Ethics
What reparations have we made for creating the privilege we live? After centuries of looting the African content for human, natural, and intellectual resources, what have we given back? Are we even trying?
In 2024, I met with the Ministry of Education in Ghana, where they assured me a top priority was eliminating “schools under trees” (schools without infrastructure), of which there are over 5,000. Estimates of their progress suggest it will be 250-300 years before they achieve their goal. They have neither the resources nor the organizational government structure to move any faster. This is the consequence of Colonialism 2.0, which we created.
It is a systems problem, not a nation’s one.
While they live it, we own it.
Point fingers all you want; innocent children and subsequent generations suffer.
I proclaim the child’s innocence because they are not the cause of these conditions. There are not good ones and bad ones, deserving ones and undeserving ones.
They are our charge, plain and simple, wherever they happen to be born.
A child born in a place with minimal access to human necessities like clean water, shelter, nutrition, healthcare, and education is no more or less worthy than a child born anywhere else.
And if the place be one shouldering centuries of devastating economic and social policies imposed by imperial ethos, by us, we might begin to sense a notion of responsibility. Of duty. Of reparation, even.
Of Literacy, Then
Literacy is an indispensable skill of modern life. It is an obligation we owe our children.
And because we made it nearly impossible for millions of kids in Africa to attend school (over 250 million were out of school 2020-2021, according to Unesco), literacy is a moral imperative.
I cannot resolve these issues alone. But I can, with the limited resources I have, do something. And it is more than just offering gifts. It is empowering kids in Africa with the same foundational benefit kids in America have: access to literacy.
Counting Up from Survival
For many African families, education is a luxury. These families count up from survival:
Water? check;
Food, check;
Shelter, check.
Anything beyond that is bonus, is moving from surviving to thriving. Crossing the line means considering things like healthcare, education, economic prospects, stability, long-term planning…
Working in school deserts means most of the kids and families I deal with live on the cusp of surviving and thriving. Some days they only survive.
To Ask the Question is Privilege
To ask the question Why should I care? about literacy rates in Africa is privilege.
A white, Western privilege. A privilege built on the human labor and natural resources we take from Africa that preserve education as something we take for granted.
If you’ve never had to count up from survival, you wouldn’t know.
Remember, or learn, where you came from, how you got to where you are today, and who sacrificed for you.
Remember, or learn, the importance of literacy everywhere in the world, particularly in places where you are implicitly supporting continued economic and social oppression.
When you know better, you do better.
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As promised…
Pat Economic Answers:
o Global illiteracy costs the economy about $1.5 trillion every year (World Literacy Foundation).
o Africa’s population is growing. Consumer spending is expected to reach over $16 trillion by 2050.
o America is losing ground to innovation and trade vacuums that other nations, like China and Russia, are filling.
o A vibrant economy with literate, employable youths stabilize governments and limits unemployed immigration to Europe and America.
o Literacy reinforces democracy; illiteracy undermines it
o The global village is connected more than ever before. Small disruptions anywhere on the planet can have seismic impacts on the US, including issues related to agriculture, health, climate change, and economics.
References and Resources
An incomplete list, but it will get you started.
Africa Dialogue Series (United Nations, 2025). Policy brief: Theme 1.
https://www.un.org/osaa/sites/www.un.org.osaa/files/sub-theme_1_-_policy_brief_-_draft.pdf
Africa’s Literacy Crisis in the Post-Pandemic Period (Forum for African Women Educationalists, 2025).
https://fawe.org/en/africas-literacy-crisis-in-the-post-pandemic-period/#_ftn5
As Africa’s Population Crosses 1.5 Billion, The Demographic Window Is Opening; Getting
The Dividend Requires More Time And Stronger Effort (United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa, 2024).
International Literacy Day 2025 (Unesco, 2025). Promoting literacy in the digital era.
https://www.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2025/09/ild-2025-factsheet.pdf
Multiply Possibility (Global Partnership for Education, 2026). Case for investment.
https://www.globalpartnership.org/funding/replenishment/financing-gpe-2030
Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations Development Programme, 2015).
https://www.undp.org/sustainable-development-goals
The illiteracy rate among all adults (over 15-year-old) in 2024, by world region (Statista,
2024).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262886/illiteracy-rates-by-world-regions/
The State of Global Learning Poverty (World Bank, 2022). 2022 update.
What You Need to Know About Literacy (Unesco, 2025).
https://www.unesco.org/en/literacy/need-know#what-is-the-global-situation-in-relation-to-literacy
Walls Needed, Not Leaves —Ghana Struggles to Eradicate “Schools Under Trees” Despite
Promises (Medium, 2024).
Why Africa Matters to the US: Top 5 Reasons (Brookings Institution, 2022).
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:147fc4b1-26db-482a-8035-62756e6abc06
Why Education? (Research Triangle Institute International, 2025).
https://www.rti.org/sites/default/files/egraresultsflyer.pdf
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