USAID’s food security strategy provides rural Mozambicans with knowledge they can use to increase their household incomes. But high levels of illiteracy can make it difficult to train people, especially women, to participate in income-generating activities. In the Zambezia Province of central Mozambique, USAID addressed this problem by funding adult literacy instructors in ten rural districts to supplement the government’s struggling literacy program.

In the remote village of Lioma, 37-year-old Luisa Eduardo resumed her primary education after twenty-one years away from school. A divorced mother of four, Luisa barely supports her family by subsistence farming. Unlike many Mozambican women of her generation, she had attended school as a girl. But a fire destroyed her family’s home when she was 14, and Luisa was forced to marry and never returned to school. Custom at that time prohibited married women from attending school because it was feared that educated women would disrespect their husbands.

Within two years, USAID-funded literacy instructors in Zambezia Province taught 4,285 adults – more than 60% of them women – to read and write or improve their literacy skills. Now Luisa can calculate the price of goods she buys at the market and help her children with their homework. She also knows how to grow vegetables like onions, tomatoes, and lettuce, which