All in

In the year 2000, the UN set eight goals, ambitious goals that included the eradication of extreme poverty, the reduction of child mortality and the promotion of gender equality. These were known as the Millennium Development Goals. As all good goals should be, they were time bound, due to be achieved by 2015. Here we are, 2015, and there is still a long way to go.

This year, there has been much discussion about what is next for development. Post-2015, what can we do about the problems of a world that seems overrun by them? The UN, along with world leaders, has answered this question by establishing the Sustainable Development Goals, seventeen of them, with targets to achieve by 2030 (check them all out here www.globalgoals.org) .

These goals are ambitious, hugely so. Goal One is to “End poverty in all its forms everywhere”. It can’t get much more ambitious than that! There has been a lot of chat about whether these goals are achievable or not and if it even matters. I’ll get into that in a later blog, but for now, I think there is one important point. If these goals are to be achievable, they need to live up to their “Global” name. They need to not be just for the poor and the UN and NGOs. We all need to get on board. And that starts with everybody knowing about the SDGs, what they are and what they mean. Before doing my Masters, I had heard of the MDGs, but definitely didn’t know much about them. That needs to be different with the SDGs. They are going to involve a lot of cooperation, a lot of people working for them, and at the end of the day, they affect us all.

So I encourage you to go the Global Goals website, look at the goals. Maybe you won’t care about all of them, maybe you won’t care about many of them, but I’m sure you will care about some of them. They cover health, education, the environment, equality. Pick one, maybe two and read more about about it. Write it down. Instagram it, put it on Facebook, tweet about it; it may seem like a simple, even a pointless response, but the more people that know about these goals, the greater the chance of success. Sometimes I struggle with social media, with how I look on it, with hashtags, with what people think, with jumping on a bandwagon, but if there’s a bandwagon worth jumping on at the moment, this is it. Tweeting about a health goals is not going to cure AIDS, instagramming education is not going to get girls straight into school, but I genuinely think it’s a great way to start: to tell people what is going on, to have us all on the same page, pushing in the same direction.

I’m off to do it now!

#GlobalGoals