Caribbean & Central America - November 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

If poverty, exclusion and illiteracy are the root causes of crime and insecurity as President Mauricio Funes argues then El Salvador should steadily became a safer place. Illiteracy has fallen by some eight percentage points since Funes came to power in 2009, according to the publication of the annual household survey in October, to 12.8%. Funes also insisted during the presentation of the 2013 budget in September that his government’s overriding priority was social programmes, something which is borne out by proposed spending.

President Funes revealed on 6 September, international literacy day, that 135,000 Salvadorean adults had been lifted out of illiteracy since 2010. Six of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities have also been declared free of illiteracy since the start of 2012, and the government aims to have achieved the same landmark in a further 15 municipalities by the end of this year.

The results of the latest household survey, carried out by the statistics and census department (Digestyc) of the economy ministry, showed that illiteracy in those over the age of 10 fell to 12.8% in 2011, from around 20% when Funes took power. Unsurprisingly the figure is much higher in rural areas (20.7%) than urban areas (8.2%) and is most prevalent in adults over the age of 34. Of the 652,928 illiterate Salvadoreans, nearly two-thirds are women.

Illiteracy is one of the legacies of the country’s brutal civil war in the 1980s, and one of the areas that Funes and the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberaciόn Nacional (FMLN), which brought him to power, promised to address in government. In March 2010, Vice-President Salvador Sánchez Cerén launched a programme, “Educating for Life”, in the western town of Izalco, where he said indigenous communities had been marginalised for years. The initiative established a national volunteer network and included technical and professional training. It targeted 65 of the country’s poorest municipalities.

While the government has made important strides against illiteracy, it is worth noting that Sánchez Cerén, who until recently served as education minister, promised back then that illiteracy would be reduced to around 4% by the time of the next elections in March 2014. As Sánchez Cerén is the presidential candidate for the FMLN in these elections, he might not want to be reminded of this bold objective unless further progress is made quickly.

With this in mind, the FMLN trumpeted the government’s commitment to social development spending in the draft budget proposal that Finance Minister Carlos Cáceres, presented to the legislative assembly in late September. The proposed budget for 2013 is, at US$4.51bn, up nearly 7% on this year.

Social development accounts for US$2.09bn, or 45%, of the total proposed budget. By far the largest slice of the pie, US$882m, was set aside for education, just under 20% of the entire budget. That said the education budget was actually only up 4% (or US$35m in absolute terms) on this year’s budget, while health, for instance, received a bigger increase: up by over 8% to US$565.4m. By comparison, spending on justice and public security was US$356m, up by 9%.

The opposition Alianza Republicana Nacional (Arena) described the budget as “unreal”, and based on a set of assumptions that simply failed to stack up. One of these, it argued, was that growth would be 2.3% in 2013, almost twice the growth to which the country has grown accustomed in recent years. The trade deficit, meanwhile, will increase to US$5.3bn. It was not so long ago that this used to be covered by remittances, but that is out of the question now.

• Household survey

The Digestyc household survey also produced a series of other interesting statistics. It found that 92.6% of Salvadorean households have electricity, for instance, and 83.8% have access to piped water (although this figure is closer to 66% in rural areas). Separately, it reported that 88% of households had a mobile phone; 84% a TV; 62% a refrigerator; and 12 % internet access.