What did we learn from Webinar on SDGs?

post-webnr-sdg

In the last webinar on 28 September 2016, the issues relating to sustainable development have been detailed and efforts for integration of UN SDG goals into Girls Inspire initiatives were outlined. We must agree that the overall design and presentation in the webinar was meaningfully focused and was easy to understand. COL’s Vice-President, Dr K. Balasubramanian explained that SDGs are interrelated like 17 wheels of a car. That means, keeping a single goal unaddressed, we can’t expect the best results from the other goals. However, addressing Goal 5.3 can have a huge impact on other targets too. Educating a girl can help the society to reduce child marriage, avoid maternal health risks, enhance women empowerment, better child care, eliminate poverty, reduce hunger, etc. I got some important lessons and learning from the Webinar on the SDGs. The most important one is “Meaningful and skill based education can reduce the child marriage and enhance the level of women empowerment”.
Could you share one thing that you have learned from the webinar? I am looking forward to your contribution in this regard.

6 thoughts on “What did we learn from Webinar on SDGs?”

  1. I read some article related sustainable Development and would like to share with you the following goals:
    Achieving gender equality and empower all women and girls .
    End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.
    To eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual exploitation and other types.
    Eliminate all harmful practices such as early marriages, forced and children and female genital mutilation.
    Recognize and value the care work and unpaid household through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies, and the promotion of shared responsibility within the home and family, according to the national contexts.
    Ensure the full and effective participation of women and equal opportunities for leadership in all decision-making levels in the political, economic and public life.
    Increase the use of basic technologies, in particular ICT, to promote women’s empowerment.

    1. Mostafa Azad Kamal

      Thanks Rui for your valuable comments. Great that you shared the critical goals that are very much related to gender equality and equity. Thanks again for your kind comments. I do hope that the partners will be benefitted from your comments. I will be looking forward to having more comments from you in the upcong blogs too/
      Cheers,
      Mostafa

  2. As we were discussing this afternoon, the biggest issue for SDG, Women’s Empowerment or gender sensitivity is the way education is looked at from a contextually irrelevant, divorced from the ground reality and regimented way of building stereotypes. What are the girls learning- algebra over basic health? What are we aspiring for, getting grades out of hand washing process plastered in textbooks? What are boys learning from their history- the nation was only built by men? I think the 17 wheels of a truck is the right example as if a truck does have 17 wheels it would never run. The 18th one is more important- CONTEXT. Our ability to dis-align comes from the very fact that we have always learnt to ignore contexts, particularly the socio-cultural context. This drives our belief that economy, politics, education an other global windows like them drive the social and cultural framework; whereas its just the opposite. The traditional systems have of course failing; because while the planets caring capacity is 1.2 billion, we have crowded it with 6.7. Can we redesign our socio-culture context? Can we redesign our beliefs, religions, culture? Most of us live in Nations defined by constitutions which (largely) does not make sense today! How are we addressing that? If we don’t break things down, where is the space for building the new? We trying permutations and combinations based on parameters that are age old, frail and dying. Bringing in new goals based on the old parameters that don’t hold true any more. If we talk about Sustainable Development Goals, we can only succeed when we change our attitude. Yes of course we have not thrown out our bicycles when we invented the aircraft, but we certainly don’t try to reach New York from Mumbai on that bicycle either. CONTEXT needs to define everything that we do and will do to sustain ourselves.
    Sorry for being aggressive and disruptive, but that perhaps is the way of EVOLUTION, if we closely study it

  3. Mostafa Azad Kamal

    Dear Kuntal,
    It is my delight to read your detailed comment. Yes, I agree with you on the 18th point. Context is the most important factor what must be considered with top priority whenever we think of any intervention. So the implementation strategies should be context specific for each of the communities or societies.
    Thanks a lot once again for your thoughtful and specific comment. It is really worth reading.
    Best regards,
    Mostafa

  4. This was a great effort of COL to organised such a thoughtful webinar.I know its not an easy task to accumulate all the partners from around the world..What I personally learnt that despite the color,race and geographic difference our issues related to girls and women are same.So we have a common ground to share and learn from each other.In achieving SDGs at this platform we need to dig out more and more common grounds where we can work together and inspire others to become a part of our achievements.Cultural diversity is a strength but needs to be focused when searching for mutual goals and targets. Sustainability is very important for any project but for achieving SDGs we cannot just rely on one issue or topic.We need to see the holistic picture even in designing of our projects.

    1. Mostafa Azad Kamal

      Thanks Qudsia for your nice comment. Please kindly extend your support by putting more comments on upcoming blogs too.

Comments are closed.