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Inscribed on the Memory of the World Regional Register for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2006 and on the MoW International Register in 2007, the archives of the National Literacy Campaign are a unique collection of diverse documents created on the occasion of a mass literacy campaign conducted in Nicaragua in 1980. The campaign was organized a few months after the overthrow of the dictatorship of the Somoza family and it was made possible with the participation of more than 60,000 young people who, for five months, travelled to the rural areas of the country to teach more than half of the impoverished and illiterate population of Nicaragua to read and write. At the same time, brigades of volunteer teachers from 16 countries joined the literacy campaign to support technical and organisational tasks, the preparation of manuals, books and teaching materials for literacy, and to train the Nicaraguan youth. Through this large-scale effort, the illiteracy rate was reduced in five months from 50.3% to 12.9%. It was a major experience for young Nicaraguans from urban areas who taught people to read, and also discovered and got to know the other half of the country, and the conditions of marginalisation and poverty inherited from 50 years of dictatorship.

The National Literacy Crusade, the most important educational and cultural event in the history of Nicaragua, generated a variety of documents, compiled and preserved by the Institute of History of Nicaragua. Among them are letters, interviews, accounts, field journals, maps, cassettes, and literacy manuals in Spanish, Creole English, Miskito, and Sumo (languages of the ethnic minorities of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua).