Isolated and proximate illiteracy - And why these concepts matter in measuring literacy and designing education programmes

Traditionally, a society's literacy has been measured by the 'literacy rate ' or the per cent of the adult population that is literate. The present pap er maintains that the distribution of Literates across households also matt ers, due to the external effects of literacy - the benefits that illiterate members of a household derive from having a literate person in the family. The authors review this argument, draw out its policy implications, and pr esent some suggestive data from Bangladesh to lend substance to the hypothe sis that an illiterate belonging to a household with no literates is more d eprived than an illiterate belonging to a household with at least one liter ate member.