2020 SDG Student Summit

On November 7th, I attended the 2020 Sustainable Development Goals(SDG) Student Summit. On November 9th, my teammates and I proposed the action plan to train teachers in the countries hardly affected by Covid-19 how to work with computers.

The SDG summit, an annual conference hosted by Envoy, provided me with an environment to meet and collaborate with bright-minded students around the world to design some solutions for some of the world’s most intractable problems. There are four Sustainable Development Goals to choose from, and I signed up for the one about Peace, Justice, and Institution.

The event started out with a talk by Luis Enrique Garcia - Former Deputy Minister of Education in the Republic of Columbia - about the importance of everyone having a proper education. He recounted an enriching story about the time when Columbia was rampaged by drugs and civil war and his experience, as a kid, observing it happen. As the government failed to combat drug lords and tribal leaders, violence perpetrated across the country, and Garcia, who was 17 back then, reluctantly learned how to use a gun for the first time in the military. He was not the only one as thousands of children got recruited by the drug gangs and trained to use weapons to hurt others. Garcia attributed the chaos to the government’s negligence and their irresponsibility in blaming the autonomy of education in Columbia as an excuse. Instead of addressing the underlying problems behind the issue, the government focuses on the threat and resorts to violence as a way to suppress it. The citizens, without proper education, lack the resources and human capital to resist being misled and influenced by different forces. The enriching and eye-opening speech really made me realize the burning issues in many countries in which young people are stripped of the basic rights to education. I felt a nagging determination to contribute to addressing the issue of education inequalities among the world’s poorest countries.

After that, I was assigned to my group, and we, after attentively listening to all the instructions on what to do, started on our project. Inspired by the speech by Garcia, we decided to pick a topic related to education. Since our group consists of students coming from different countries (Vietnam, US, Morocco), we all agree that specifically in this time, when schools moved online, many teachers are not familiar with working with the complex computer. Therefore, we decided to come up with an action plan to tackle the problem, in which we categorize the online platform that teachers have to use to communicate with students and assign schoolwork (Zoom, Google Classroom,...), and design a manual on how to effectively utilize all of their functions for schoolwork. Despite the time difference and short period of two days, we still successfully presented our plan in front of hundreds of other attendants.

The experience taken away from the event prompts me to approach world issues from a global perspective. Working with other dedicated students around the globe, I am confident that our young people, sharing the same goals, can promote a more inclusive and sustainable planet.