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United Nations declared 2003-2012 as a United Nations Literacy Decade and the motto for the decade is “Literacy as Freedom”. The freedom to access the world of knowledge and information and to communicate freely with written words is taken for granted by those who possess the empowering tool of literacy (Education Watch 2002). As the study was conducted on the basis of adult literacy program so the concept of literacy should be given.

There is no clear borderline between concepts and no globally accepted definition of literacy. A definition of literacy and functional literacy acceptable to all countries neither exit nor is desirable. Many concise description of the historical evaluation of literacy concepts and definition, highlighting UNESCO’s role in the changing interpretation of phenomena, such functionality to more broadly perceived development and the relative nature of literacy can be found in the literature. Generally literacy means the ability to read, write and compute and fairly elementary levels to be the criterion by the most governments until 1950s (James, Jannings, 1990). First international definition comes from United Nations Population Commission in 1948 that recommended literacy should be defined as the – “ability both to write a simple message in any language” (UNESCO, 1957).

During the 1950’s there was a growing tendency to differentiate between a literate person and a functional literate person (Jennings, 1990). As the following definition suggested by UNESCO(1978) for statistical and comparison purpose, states—“a person is literate who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on his everyday life”.

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