The SDG Booster focusing on education gathered over 30 participants, including companies, NGOs, and educational institutions to innovate solutions for the East African education sector
9 September 2020
The education-themed SDG Booster, which was organized completely digitally in August-September, gathered over 30 participants, which included representatives from companies, NGOs and educational institutions. SDG Boosters, which were launched in January 2020, bring together companies, NGOs, financial instruments, and thematic experts to develop solutions and projects to address concrete needs identified from developing countries. The goal of the SDG Booster is to accelerate progress to the Sustainable Development Goals through the creation and implementation of innovative digital technology projects. Each SDG Booster is comprised of an orientation session, two workshops around a thematic topic and a geographical region and a target country event with local stakeholders, which aim to create long-term partnerships between Finnish and local actors. The workshops are facilitated by leading experts together with Finnpartnership, UNTIL, Fingo, Business Finland and Education Finland.
The SDG Booster focusing on education in East Africa and especially on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and SDG 4.7: Global Citizenship Education offers Finnish companies, NGOs and educational institutions the chance to innovate new solutions and product families to respond to the challenges in the target market that had been identified beforehand by the organizers. The SDG Booster workshops were organized on August 20th and September 4th. The first workshop included groupwork, where the participants discussed and mapped out local challenges and preliminary possible solutions for these challenges. At the second workshop, the participants were divided to smaller thematic groups to discuss for example how the using of digital teaching tools could be supported as part of teacher training or how teachers could best maintain and update their know-how. The participants also discussed their own products and services in smaller groups and considered how their products could be utilized in the comprehensive solutions that would be offered to the target market.
Both workshops also had local experts as commentators. At the second workshop, local commentators included representatives from Business Finland Kenya and the Ministry of Education in Kenya. The SDG Booster will be followed by a digital target country event in November 2020, where Finnish companies will meet potential partners from East Africa. The target country event is only open for participants who have taken part in the whole SDG Booster process. The next education-themed SDG Booster will focus on Central Asia and it will be organized in 2021.
The organizers want to thank all participants for active participation during the workshops and for the positive feedback regarding the digital realization of the workshops!