SDGs and Digital Realities

Recreating a school in a virtual world using the online game Minecraft? Let´s play!

Recreating a school in a virtual world using the online game Minecraft? Let’s play!

The SDGs will only be reached if the goals and their targets can be meaningfully brought to life in a school community and not only at the tables of policymakers. Yet how often are young people invited to act on the SDGs?

Accepting the challenge, this team sought to achieve sustainable development in a school in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, by recreating that school in a virtual world and redesigning it to align with the SDGs using the online game Minecraft. As a partnership project with secondary school Presentation College Bray and human rights charity 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World, the aim was to produce an open-world thinking platform to enable the whole school community to be involved in mapping environmental and social footprints with the potential of the SDGs.

Inverting the often top-down dissemination of education, the project began with this unique context and analyzed it using the goals; enabling participants to become active producers and engineers empowered with visualizing how these changes might look as a planning project led by young people. The challenge was on the languages. Textual language is often the typical vehicle for policy development. Visualization, however, can be empowering, lasting and bridges words with imagined realities. This initiative galvanized students to lead on visual design-based thinking linked to sustainable development, gradually involving 37 students (ages 13-17), 11 teachers and staff from 80:20.

The ‘sustainable school’ model was created by the community and for the community; each modification reflected one of the 169 targets and underpinned by the 5 P’s of the SDGs (people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership) in what kind of school they would like to see by 2030. Students drove new ideas in transforming the school into an SDG-friendly community and acted as spokespeople and champions of the visual design experiment, such as:

field visits and peer-exchanges with other social justice student groups and peer-platforms such as the Let’s Talk project;
presentations with national and SDG platforms, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Sustainability Research Coordination Group; Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland;
used social media: 20,000 project video views, and findings published in a research portfolio.

The project’s next steps are 1) to use a sustainable development open-world design model to test priority action ideas to bring about changes in the wider school community and accelerate other schools in getting started with their important role in implementing the SDGs; and 2) to share ideas and methodologies with schools and SDG stakeholders locally, nationally and globally to empower all educational institutions to nurture whole-community involvement in sustainable planning and visualisation.

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Who is behind this?

Clifton Rooney, Tony Daly, Shane McInerney and Stuart Hannon.

For more information:

Visit website

Together 2017: Collaboration, Innovation and the Sustainable Development Goals

Canada’s meeting point for crucial multi-sector conversations is on tour!

Together 2017: Collaboration, Innovation and the Sustainable Development Goals was the first-ever multi-stakeholder symposium in Canada dedicated to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. Together 2017 bridged the gap across sectors about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the importance of collaboration and innovation in achieving the 2030 Agenda.

By convening representatives from across academia, civil society, national and subnational levels of government including federal, provincial, and municipal, Indigenous communities, the private sector and youth, Together 2017 set a foundation for how all stakeholders can work collectively to use the 2030 Agenda as a framework and common language, creating better organizations and communities in a better world. While conversations within sectors are taking place across the country about Agenda 2030, there exists a significant gap for convening multi-sector conversations.

Together 2017 fostered an environment which allowed diverse stakeholders to have open dialogue, learn, share and advance together. The Together 2017 Symposium provided an opportunity and platform for participants to showcase their work, celebrate accomplishments towards the SDGs, and identify where there is more work to be done.

Together 2017 speaker and participant Terry Sloan from the Southwest Native Cultures in Albuquerque, New Mexico expressed the impact of his participation at Together 2017 as being transformative. He had the opportunity to connect and share his wealth of knowledge with those in attendance particularly through his participation in the “Indigenous Perspectives on Achieving the SDGs” session. He encouraged using the Together 2017 “template” as a mechanism to foster the achievement of the UN SDGs and advancing Agenda 2030 both locally and globally.

Together 2018 will be taking place in Edmonton, Alberta in October 2018 with satellite conferences happening from coast to coast to coast across Canada. The Together movement has convened organizations to start a conversation that would not normally occur and will continue over the next 13 years. Conference organizers hope that Together will become a recurring symposium that travels across the country, broadening representation, charting progress, identifying next steps and keeping the discussion on the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs alive and current. Together 2018 will look at what has been accomplished and where more efforts are needed. It will examine Canada’s voluntary national review, encourage new leaders to join the movement, and identify innovative ways to tackle the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs.

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Who is behind this?

Alberta Council for Global Cooperation

For more information:

Visit their Facebook page

The Stockholm Act

A win-win-win-win program with many satakeholders (and no unintelligible jargon)

A win-win program with many stakeholders (and no unintelligible jargon)

One of the complicated challenges -as well as one of the strengths- of Agenda 2030 is the underlying goal to communicate the SDGs simultaneously. It demands a kind of whole earth approach without becoming lost in abstract detachment. The aim is to go deep as well as wide.

The team behind the Stockholm Act created a space that managed to navigate this somehow paradoxical aim. By bringing together the otherwise separated dimensions – politics, finance, culture and science – they forced the language out of a jargon that can easily be distancing. The seven day long festival included a widespread program such as philosophically contemplating “The Overview Effect” live on stage with the Swedish Space Program, Carl Folke (Stockholm Resilience Centre), Johanna Koljonen and the world famous jazz band, Fire! Orchestra. Meantime, in another room, students from Fryshuset (16-20 years old) presented an assignment on how youth view the Agenda 2030.

The students coordinated with a startup, Inicio, the Royal Institute of Technology, the Swedish Energy Agency and Fortum Värme. Together they tried and also made a bicycle that could recharge smartphones used to upload photos on Snapchat/Instagram. Fortum Värme’s CEO also got a mentor from Fryshuset in digital transformation. A win-win coordinated event and a collaboration between different stakeholders that is still developing further.

Living in the postmodern paradigm, one of the dangers is social fragmentation, and the examples in current years across are abundant. Behind the initiative is the belief that in order to accelerate the transformation toward Agenda 2030 as much as possible, everyone should feel engaged and invited. A strategy was built to broaden the engagement for Agenda 2030 and to safeguard from creating a movement that a lot of people felt excluded from.

The team managed to create an inclusive platform open to all regardless of class, background, age, expertise or expression, gathering over 41 000 visitors. The plan for the future is to share the knowledge for the next Act (in Sweden or another place in the world) to help accelerate the movement to achieve the global goals.

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Who is behind this?

The Stockholm Coordination Initiative

For more information:

www.stockholmact.se

REACT & Youth Skills and Innovation Initiative

Education in emergencies requires urgent fundraising and a powerful business coalition

The business community’s contributions to education have been small, short-term, and uncoordinated – and a fraction of the size of business contributions to other sectors like health and climate. With an estimated 75 million children having had their education disrupted and more than half of the world’s young people projected to be without the basic skills necessary for job by 2030, the team behind this initiative decided there was no time to waste.

The Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education) brings together business alongside NGOs, UN Agencies and young people to solve the toughest challenges in education and drive forward progress on SDG 4. Two challenges the team has prioritized are education in emergencies and the youth skills gap. The small team has “hearts of activists and heads of strategists” and they have leveraged millions of dollars in public-private support to help young people have opportunity through education. The team established the REACT digital platform to efficiently and effectively record, match, and deploy corporate resources to the education needs in emergencies. By utilizing the digital platform’s immediacy and ease of access, the project has enabled a real-time matchmaking and streamlined delivery of contributions from more than 55 companies to the most urgent educational needs.

For instance, the team worked with HP on a Livelihoods Center in Istanbul to support Syrian refugees. Marisa – a Syrian refugee who left everything behind and had her university education stopped because of the conflict – admits this project has given her the opportunity to continue her studies and to have a routine and a place to go to everyday to gain skills for a job. To address the looming skills gap, the Youth Skills and Innovation Initiative convenes business leaders, youth organizations, international organizations and civil society to identify models for industry leaders bridge the skills gap by working directly with young people.

These unique partnerships across diverse stakeholders make it possible to deliver positive impact and transformative models of change. Just last month, the project brokered a $15 million pledged from the business community to deliver low-cost technology solutions for school systems in the poorest countries and expand access to learning opportunities for millions of children. The team aspires to be the go-to source for the business community in global education to lead the private sector in driving education investments across the globe, engaging in critical dialogue on key issues, facilitating multi-sector partnerships, and harnessing opportunities to bring dozens of companies and partnerships valued at hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver SDG4.

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Who is behind this?

A team of five youth leaders from the Global Business Coalition for Education

For more information:

REACT & Youth skills and innovation

AYM Youth Empowerment Forum on the Implementation of SDGs and Agenda2063

What started in 2012 as a Facebook group is now totally out of control

Afrika Youth Movement (AYM) is a pan-African, youth-led movement that strives for the participation, development and leadership of African youth to transform Africa. Started as a Facebook group in 2012, launched in 2015, AYM is becoming one of Africa’s largest youth movements connecting 10,000 members from 40 countries. To boost the implementation of the SDGs, it is critical to mobilize and invest in the continent’s youth to amplify their voices and empower them to collaborate in incorporating the agenda into national development strategies.

The team identified the gaps in awareness and coordination among youth initiatives as well as youth and other stakeholders nationally, regionally and globally. Also, they identified the need to play the role of a Connector because there were no other networks trying to fill this gap particularly with a focus on empowering youth in creating the Africa We Want by co-creating innovative ways of engagement. Therefore, the team created a groundbreaking new model of youth forums on the continent called “AYM Youth Empowerment Forum from Global Agenda to Africa’s Agenda”.

By organizing the inaugural Forum in Nairobi, they brought together 84 various youth actors many of whom represent grassroots initiatives, from 19 countries and equipped them with needed tools to connect and engage in the implementation and monitoring of the SDGs. They also partnered with universities and engaged the UN and other stakeholders by hosting conversations that matter for youth through open space, art of hosting and creative ways of harnessing collective wisdom and organizing.

The forums have resulted in structured, gender balanced, committed country focused teams called “AYM Youth Hubs”. The forum model was also replicated into national forums; in Lagos engaging religious leaders and Kampala engaging embassies and private sector. The funding model focused on maximizing strategic partnerships, members’ mobilization through their organizations and community fundraising. The initiative has been transformative, inclusive, impactful and life-changing for the members of this community.

One of many inspiring stories is Smith Etumba who took a bus trip from Goma via Kigali and Kampala to reach Nairobi to participate in the forum. He was exposed for the first time to an African event discussing the SDGs and connected to many youth from different countries. After a few weeks he went again to Nairobi to represent AYM at the Africa Youth Peace (AYP) Forum to speak about the Congo experience and he helped in the creation of AYPNet, a regional peacebuilding network. Smith went back home and launched with other Congolese participants a national hub under the theme “Active youth, Drivers of Development”. He is now an advocate of SDGs and connector in his community.

The team has already launched four decentralized hubs, in Uganda, Ghana, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria and they want to launch another 15 hubs across Africa this year, where their members are eager to organize their national forums. The forums and hubs resulted in harmonized Action Plans, peer-to-peer mentorship advocacy campaigns and regional spaces that need our ongoing support and facilitation.

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Who is behind this?

Afrika Youth Movement

For more information:

Visit http://afrikayouthmovement.org/

Integrando tecnología educativa en Casa de la Mujer Indígena “Mak Ujhani”

Indigenous women find a shelter to treat and avoid gender violence -and it is run by one of them

Angelica Ruiz Felix, an otomí indigenous woman from Queretaro, Mexico is a mother of 4 children, artisan, Otomi cultural manager and official Otomi-Spanish translator. She is also the administrator of the House of Indigenous Woman “Casa de la Mujer Indígena ´Mak Ujhani´” (CAMI) in Tolimán, Querétaro, Mexico.

CAMI is a center run by women trained as promoters, facilitators and traditional doctors. The problem they address with their work is the prevention and eradication of violence against women. This initiative offers services at the CAMI to prevent, assist and give follow-up care to women that have suffered any type of violence.

The center also raises awareness through workshops, courses and summits to women and men and create spaces to exchange experiences and work along with public servants to address violence against women in the municipality.

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Who is behind this?

Angelica Ruiz Felix

For more information:

Visit website

Youth Power Accountability Advocates

Since 2015, this initiative has provided Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) to over 1,000 teenagers and educated 40 rural mothers on maternal health in Ghana. Some of the girls who benefitted from the education and services were able to avoid pregnancy and stay in school

Since 2015, this initiative has provided Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) to over 1,000 teenagers and educated 40 rural mothers on maternal health in Ghana. Some of the girls who benefitted from the education and services were able to avoid pregnancy and stay in school

Teenage pregnancy in Ghana hit an all-time high in the year 2014 with 750,000 girls between the ages of 15-19 years being pregnant. One of the major factors that contributed to this problem which still persists was the absence of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and limited knowledge and access to contraceptives for young people.

As an advocate for women and girls’ rights and a member of Curious Minds, the changemaker behind this project began an initiative with support of Restless Development; a youth-led organization in the UK, to provide CSE and contraceptive services for young people. Together with a team, they further provided education to rural mothers in on how to reduce maternal death and ensure safe delivery. In a conservative society where tradition and religion criticize the use of modern contraceptives and sex education, not many young people will dare to be open.

Two women and a Queen Mother (Traditional Leader) who benefited from the education on safe delivery have taken up advocacy roles as a community peer educators encouraging women to visit the hospital for safe delivery rather than going to traditional birth attendants who are not certified or trained. This initiative did not only end with education and service provision. Dzikunu also works with a team of two other advocates and 20 data collectors to compile a report that identified gaps and challenges that prevent young people from accessing CSE and contraceptive services.

The findings of this report were presented to the Ghana Health Service and used the evidence influence the Ghana Adolescent Health Policy and Strategy. In 2017, Dzikunu was supported by Restless Development to present the report findings at 72nd United Nations General Assembly and subsequently in Tbilisi, Georgia during an Annual Showcase conference of the World Federation of United Nations Associations. By making these data and findings known to governments, civil society organization and other stakeholders, the project has received support such as grants from some organizations to continue empowering these young people.

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Who is behind this?

Dzikunu Richard Mawutor

For more information:

Visit http://wearerestless.org/2017/09/18/from-global-talk-to-local-action/

1 Million Impact Campaign / OKYD Project

There is nothing like taking it really personal and proclaiming yourself an ambassador

Taking SDG ambassadors to local level in Benin

Communities and citizens (including youth) have little knowledge of the UN SDGs and contribute little to its implementation in Benin. This initiative mobilizes volunteers to act for the SDGs. It is part of a global campaign that aims to reach 1 million individuals around the world in 5 months to inform them about the SDGs. This approach is unique in Benin, as nobody else is doing it.

In Benin, 120 City Ambassadors from 52 towns, including 18 women were recruited and trained. All the 120 City ambassadors implement at least one activity/event. But because of the lack of commitment, engagement and financial resources, out of the 120 City Ambassadors, 35% (42 members) did not reach their main goals during the term.

The main success is that out of the 120 City Ambassadors 65% (78 members) were able to reach their main goal which consisted in organizing in-person seminars and events to promote the SDGs and impact at least 1,000 people during the term.

For example, Mrs. Daga Assiath worked hard and successfully on SDG 13 with others stakeholders as SDGs City Ambassador at Porto-Novo. By the end of November 2017 in Benin, around 115,000 persons in 52 cities were impacted.

This initiative is an innovative project but it has challenges to its implementation. Some country Ambassadors were not able to recruit the city Ambassadors and implement the project on volunteer basis because of lack of commitment, engagement and financial resources. It is such a challenge that the project will start giving an award to the Best City Ambassador with a certificate and prize at the end of the term selection process.

Through this project, citizens and communities know more about the SDGs because activities were implemented in local language and in a familiar environment, so they were free to ask any question to understand more about the SDGs. In the coming future, the project will keep growing in Benin in order to reach all the 77 cities and adding new activities and projects.

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Who is behind this?

Agbadjagan Yacinthe Vidéou

For more information:

Visit http://www.opportunitiesknockyourdoor.com/1-million-campaign/

GoalsOnWheels

Travelling through schools makes the SDGs classroom huge

GoalsOnWheels is truly unique. An intense effort carried out voluntarily by an individual to reach the most unreached with the SDGs. The project has reached 88 schools so far, impacting about 80,000 individuals. It is not just addressing the SDG awareness gap but also inspiring others to follow suit helping the cause to reach a larger audience and multiply the impact. The initiative paved the way for many localised solutions specific to the issue. It has drawn attention from global peers who are willing to replicate the initiative in their countries.

An inspiring story of this initiative is that when the project leader met a student, Rithwik, in the initial days of the campaign. The campaign gave him a stage to speak and only then they could know how intelligible that kid was. He has volunteered to lead SDG 13 within his school. Recently, the project leader has revisited them and was surprised to hear and see transformational change. Rithwik convinced not just his friends but the school management to reduce usage of polythene bags and the school has taken a resolution to make the premise a polythene free zone. He says now he wishes to become a global climate champion by saving his planet from climate deterioration.

This is all what the initiative aspires to do, apprise and inspire. The current ambitious target to reach hundred thousand students is only a initial phase of the global impact going to be created. In the next phase multiple campaigns will be launched across the world. Together with all the countries, large scale implementable solutions will be worked on. Furthermore, this entrepreneur is working with the local government to make their policies in line with the SDGs.

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Who is behind this?

Akhilesh Reddy Singi Reddy

For more information:

Visit http://singanna.com/goals-on-wheels/

SDGs Youth Training Canada

Youth is already organized, you just have to knock on their student groups’ doors

How can youth meaningfully participate in the movement toward a sustainable, prosperous and equitable Canada? How can Canadian civil society create space for youth, moving beyond just few youth representatives, to include diverse youth as active, fully engaged global citizens?

That is the problem the Foundation for Environmental Stewardship (FES) set out to tackle in 2016-2017, partnering with student-organizing groups across post-secondary institutions in Canada to bring the Sustainable Development Goals Advocacy and Local Implementation program across the country; from St. Johns, Newfoundland in the Maritimes, all the way to the west coast in Kamloops, British Columbia.

The first initiative of its type, the SDGs Youth Training Canada program is designed to engage and mobilize young people and build their capacities in sustainable problem solving, exercising this muscle to make it our generation’s core competency. Understanding the history, guiding principles and measurement of the SDGs is just the first step of the program, which is what students are introduced to at the training on their campus. The most important part of engagement with students is facilitating the design and implementation of an SDG Project in their local communities, catalyzing them to action.

Every campus SDGs Youth Training event hosted this year was entirely organized and driven by students, for students. Club organizers, student activists, elected departmental representatives and all other types of student leaders were the drivers of the SDGs Youth Training on their campus, and they are the leaders taking on the mantle of local implementation.

It is FES’ firm conviction that youth serving work must center the value, capacities and goals of youth themselves. Through the cross-country tour, Canadian students have demonstrated irrevocably that youth are willing and able to be the champions of the SDGs.

Nearly 6000 Canadian students came out from coast to coast to 32 trainings, representing 77 post-secondary institutions across the country. When asked if the training increased their understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals , 96% of the 400+ respondents asserted that it did and, perhaps most humbling for us is that when asked how much more likely they are to take action (e.g. advocacy and local implementation) on the SDGs after this training, 81% of respondents said they were likely to do so.

With the energy the program has generated at the grassroots, and guidance from FES SDGs Program Staff, students are collectively organizing the first ever Canadian Student Network for the Sustainable Development Goals, a national level youth body that will represent student voices in policy advocacy!

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For more information:

Visit https://www.fesplanet.org/