Photo credit: Shukri Ahmed

On 6 April, Action Education participated in "Act for Tomorrow", an event organised by the student association AIESEC. A look back at an event where sustainable development was in the spotlight.

AIESEC is the largest international not-for-profit organisation run entirely by students. Its main objective is to promote leadership and international cooperation through voluntary and professional exchange programmes for students.

On the occasion of the "Act for tomorrow" week (3-7 April), students from AIESEC (Geneva) visited us to promote organisations related to sustainable development, while raising awareness of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 5, "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls", gave us the opportunity to discuss our actions in relation to the empowerment of women and access to education for girls from marginalised and vulnerable populations, particularly in Burkina Faso and India.

SDG 4: a cross-cutting SDG

At the event, Action Education used case studies from its projects in the field to illustrate how we are contributing to SDG5 and the central impact of SDG4 on the other development goals over the past 40 years. Education is the key to sustainable development. As a reminder and example, access to education would, among other things, make it possible to fight against :

- extreme poverty (MDG1): the number of people in extreme poverty could be halved if 400 million adults completed secondary education,

- diseases (MDG3): a child under 5 is twice as likely to survive if his or her mother can read and write,

- Social and economic inequalities (MDG5): an educated girl is 6 times less likely than an uneducated girl to experience early marriage and pregnancy.

A big thank you to AIESEC for including us in this week of raising awareness of the 17 SDGs among the general public.