LAMP - Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme 

“Can you read and write?”

This question is commonly used to produce literacy statistics. In most countries, there are no other measures – just a simple count based on information gathered in a household survey or census. Answer “yes” and join the ranks of the so-called literates. Answer “no” and you are considered to be illiterate.

While these conventional statistics are useful for benchmarking progress globally, they do not reflect the full spectrum of skills associated with reading and numeracy.

What is the role of the UIS?

The UIS has developed the Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme (LAMP) to provide the diagnostic information required to monitor and improve literacy skills. It is designed to:  

• provide robust data on the distribution of reading and numeracy skills within the youth and adult populations;
• deliver information needed to effectively plan and carry out initiatives to improve literacy skills;
• develop a global methodological standard for measuring reading and numeracy skills in a way that can be compared across countries at different stages of development and linguistic contexts; and
• reinforce national capacities to regularly generate and use state-of-the-art assessment data.

LAMP is specifically designed to provide policy planners, donors and others interested in the public debate on literacy with the information required to effectively plan and implement literacy programmes.To do so, LAMP measures five levels of literacy, which can be summarized as:

• Level 1: the individual has very poor skills and may, for example, be unable to determine the correct dose of medicine to give a child from the label on a package.
• Level 2: respondents can only deal with simple, clearly laid-out reading tasks. At this level, people can read but test poorly. They may have developed coping skills to meet everyday literacy demands, but they find it difficult to tackle new challenges, such as certain job skills.
• Level 3: considered a suitable minimum for coping with demands of daily life and work in a complex society. This skill level is generally required to successfully complete secondary school and enter college.
•  Level 4 and 5: respondents demonstrate a good command of higher-order information processing skills.

In addition, LAMP focuses on individuals most in need by measuring pre-reading skills. These measures are needed to design literacy programmes that take into account the prior knowledge of potential participants.

How does LAMP address linguistic, cultural and socio-economic differences?

All of the LAMP instruments and methodologies have been tested, validated and refined based on extensive pilot testing in diverse countries. As a result, LAMP:

• caters to countries at all stages of development;
• has been validated in ten languages belonging to six linguistic families using three different scripts and two numeral systems; and
• yields data that can be compared across time, countries and cultures.