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 non-profit organisation run entirely by students and whose main objective is to promote leadership and international cooperation through voluntary and professional student exchange programmes.

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).

It is on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 on "Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls" that we had the opportunity to exchange on our actions in relation to women's empowerment and access to education for girls from marginalized and vulnerable populations, notably in Burkina Faso and India.

SDG 4: a cross-cutting SDG

At the event, Action Education illustrated, through practical cases of its projects on the ground, how we are contributing to SDG5 as well as the central impact of SDG4 on the other SDGs, for the past 40 years. For education is the key to sustainable development. As a reminder and example, access to education would, among other things, allow us 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.