Voices around the world are demanding leadership on poverty, inequality and climate change. To turn these demands into actions, world leaders gathered on 25 September, 2015, at the United Nations in New York to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The 2030 Agenda comprises 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, which will guide policy and funding for the next 15 years, beginning with a historic pledge to end poverty. Everywhere. Permanently.
The Global Goals replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which in September 2000 rallied the world around a common 15-year agenda to tackle the indignity of poverty.
This new development agenda applies to all countries, promotes peaceful and inclusive societies, creates better jobs and tackles the environmental challenges of our time—particularly climate change.
The Global Goals must finish the job that the MDGs started, and leave no one behind.
SDGs can only be reached in their entirety if gender equality is achieved, unleashing female potential through comprehensive access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes. These proven concepts at the heart of the SDG agenda will render it more likely that bold ambition can be translated into positive and far-reaching consequences for us all. This then necessitates the need for an integrated approach to creating awareness around the SDGs through a robust peer to peer education awareness program that integrates and mainstreams a gender-responsive model into creating awareness around the SDGs.
Hence the SDG Schools Tour campaign. The concept of leaving no one behind entails doing all we can to have more involved and holistic approach to promoting awareness and understanding of the Global Goals, and at encouraging schools to take measurable action towards achieving them, by empowering and enabling schools through knowledge resources, incentive programs, community engagements and establishing SDGs clubs in each of the schools, which will would grom the young ones to become thinkers and problem solvers thereby , accelerate progress towards SDGs 4.7 and 12.8 (education for sustainable development).
However, mere awareness is not adequate, as we have repeatedly seen that students are usually unable to develop an honest curiosity and passion for the Goals without undertaking concrete initiatives that go beyond an academic understanding of the goals. To truly provide students with the benefits of engaging with the goals, we will empower them not only with the knowledge that the require, but also with the skills, attitudes and behaviors that they will need to act on their knowledge. Engaging the goals in an experiential manner can afford these opportunities to students, and as such, we believe that acting towards achieving the SDGs is the most effective way of engaging students in understanding and learning about the Global Goals, and of unlocking all the benefits that this brings with it.
Set up a formal SDG Club in each school, which will meets on a weekly basis to discuss ideas to improve the sustainability of the school. We will also encourage members of the SDG Club to lead the sustainability movement in their schools.
This process also seeks to engage with the Government of Cameroon ahead of a call for a Decade of Action ahead of 2030 to understand how fat the Cameroonian government is with regards to the attainment of the SDGs as well as what role she is playing in creating safe spaces for girls to flourish and be more involved with activities around the SDGs.