Paulo Montenegro Institute and Ação Educativa – partners in the creation and implementation of the Indicador Nacional de Alfabetismo Funcional (Inaf) (Indicator of Functional Literacy) – organized this report to present the analyses and interpretations of of the results of the Brazilian adult population’s literacy levels measurement, held in the second half of 2009.
Carried out since 2001, Inaf Brasil is based on interviews and cognitive tests applied in national samples of 2,000 people representative of Brazilian population from 15 to 64 years old, living in urban and rural areas of all regions of the country.
The dissemination of school performance indicators such as Prova Brasil, ENEM and others, at the state and municipal levels, has fueled the public debate on the quality of education systems. While on the one hand everyone is celebrating the expansion of educational opportunities in recent decades, on the other there is a growing concern about the insufficient levels of learning that the indicators reveal. Many governmental and nongovernmental initiatives have been put in place to transform the right to access schooling into the effective right to learn, at school and throughout life.
Inaf Brasil seeks to contribute to this debate by bringing complementary and unpublished data, focused not only on those attending school but on the adult population as a whole, stimulating the promotion of public actions and policies that allow the incorporation of growing portions of Brazilians to the literate culture, information society, social and political participation and a range of decent, responsible and creative work opportunities.