Alternative bilingual Miskito-Spanish intercultural literacy education linked to the exercise of citizenship and community production

The Alternative Bilingual Intercultural Literacy Education project is carried out in five rural indigenous communities and eleven urban neighbourhoods of Bilwi (Puerto Cabezas) in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) of Nicaragua. In this region, illiteracy is the result of poverty, historical social exclusion and the lack of any official or State programme of adult literacy education in the Miskito language. This constitutes a negation of the right to bilingual intercultural education of the young and adult indigenous population and an obstacle to individual, social and regional development. The project provides literacy classes for young people and adults in their mother tongue Miskito and in Spanish, and deals with intercultural themes of their world view, the environment and indigenous rights. In Nicaragua, this experiment is a unique and alternative model of literacy provision in Miskito, with a Miskito-Spanish bilingual intercultural curriculum of its own. The texts have been produced by authors from the Miskito ethnic group, with contents determined on the basis of a needs analysis and the identification of fundamental features of the Miskito world view.