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Education is a major challenge for developing countries and for the poorest amongst the poor. When the poorest make a step further, all the society is affected, can grow and grows more equally.

ICT play a major role in the struggle for literacy and education in developing countries because it constitutes a domain of programmable, personalized instruments that can be adapted to different conditions, cultures, populations, and because of the necessity of facing the challenges of new forms of literacy and divide: digital literacy, and digital divide.

Digital literacy is becoming part of the curriculum of young people in the rich world; it is a crucial acquisition for pursuing one’s own studies, and also for finding new job opportunities. Additionally, it can represent a wonderful set of tools for enhancing and exercising creativity, ingenuity, inquiry.

It is impossible to consider literacy in developing countries without facing the problem of reducing the new gap in terms of opportunities and instruments that could be created by an unequal development of the digital literacy in the world.

So, in the digital era, literacy is no more just reading and writing, and eventually numeracy, but includes the capacity of exploiting all the available ‘digital opportunities’, and to make new ones available: portable phones, internet or digital village centers, low cost computers for children, mobile internet. Without forgetting the potential of tradition al media, such as television and the radio.

Literacy is not only a matter of children, but also of adults in urban and rural areas, and in particular of women, who are often left behind. Literacy programs should then face this complexity, and provide different, as-far-as-possible integrated, solutions.

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