MY EXPERIENCE AT THE UNITED NATIONS YOUTH ASSEMBLY AS A YOUTH DELEGATE
Student Perspective: How I Learned To Apply Design Thinking To The SDGs by Rachel Tugutu
From August 10 to 13, I had the chance to take part in the 22nd session of the Youth Assembly as a Youth Delegate. Powered by the Friendship Ambassadors Foundation, this event gathers young people from all around the world to try and tackle concrete solutions for sustainable development. One of the most powerful messages we received was that most of the time solution lies in partnerships. It may be partnerships across sectors, but also partnerships across generations: there is a burning need for both innovation and youth involvement on the difficult path toward achieving the SDGs.
This conference was followed by a hands-on introduction to design thinking methods aimed at finding solutions to sustainable development problems. The workshop was leading by Walid Beramdane, co-president of the Ideas for Action student club at the University of Pennsylvania. John Cardone, founder of Being Design, Inc. Beramdane and Cardone informed us the problem when designing solutions is that paradoxically the final user tends to be forgotten in the process: one often focuses too much on the product without taking the user’s feedback into account.
Design thinking is an approach to innovation that does the exact opposite. It starts with the user’s needs and receives feedback at every step of the process. This fundamentally important when it comes to sustainable development projects, and there are numerous instances when social ventures have ended up wasting sums of money after delivering poorly designed solutions.
After this short theoretical introduction, we split into groups, and everyone ended up with people they had never spoken to before this session: my group consisted of three Nigerians, two from German, a Saudi Arabian, and Brazilian. We talked about the reason we were attending the Youth Assembly and a problem each of us was working on then, choose the one problem our group would be tackling during the rest of the workshop. Anna, a teacher from Brazil, told us how she was facing abnormally high dropout rates among her students and was having a hard time finding concrete ways to overcome this.
We chose to focus on this very substantial and measurable problem that had complex causes on several layers.
The first step with design thinking is empathy: one has to put one’s self in the final user’s shoes. For us, it meant analyzing the reasons why a student would drop out of high school in Brazil. The conclusion we came to is that it was the students’ lack of motivation, confidence, and trust in their environment.
The situation in Brazil, particularly in these students’ surroundings, is leading them to think they are better off dropping out of school and trying to get a job directly. We then asked to think about the solution we would choose if we had all the money in the world, and then if we could not invest a single dollar, to go through all the possibilities.
I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical about our ability to take concrete steps forward in such a little time, as the workshop lasted less than an hour and a half. Surprisingly we did achieve results that were quite convincing. Without involving any spending, we thought about inviting successful alumni back to Anna’s school and organizing conferences and meetings for them to act as role models for the students and highlight how studying had been in the process leading them to where they stand today.
What struck me from this workshop was how different experiences were useful in coming up with potential solutions. As an advocate, l work to help young children and adults to have access to their education. I explained how the concept worked and how creating something similar in Anna’s school could be relevant. Would help provide her students what they lack: confidence and motivation. They would gain confidence by realizing they can have an impact on their scale while studying, and they would gain motivation to achieve success for a project that is their very own. The aforementioned successful alumni could also be part of the process, being patrons of the initiative, or giving advice on how to grow an entrepreneurial project from scratch.
All in all, this session ended up being even more enriching than I could have thought, for several reasons:
- We made concrete steps forward regarding the problem we chose to analyze.
- We all learned about issues and situations we were not aware of. It also helped us get a grasp of what it implies to tackle an issue in a country one has not been raised in, considering all of the cultural differences that appear at every step of the process.
- We discovered how some things that might seem obvious can actually lead to huge mistakes when designing a solution for a sustainable development problem. Hence the importance of always working based on feedback from the final user.
As a delegate and advocate, it seems the most important thing for our generation today is to realize we can have an impact quite easily on the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. Regardless it is through an NGO, a private company, or working for the government, there is always a way to work toward the SDGs. What we need is to reinvent the way projects are created by forging meaningful partnerships between sectors to achieve differentiation and flexibility and to get closer to local needs.
As a Youth Delegate, this session and the event as a whole made me feel the urge to act as fast as possible. Growing up, one tends to take everything for granted and also consider there is little to change around people. But what makes the SDGs so powerful is that they will consider every country to developing in a certain way: there are majors flaws in countries that need to be solved. Together, I hope we can improve the education system and educational learning to advance the world’s education and gender equality from this generation and its implementation.
In every aspect of the SDGs, we can engage in many different areas and try to empower youth by setting up innovative actions.
- We can have an impact on the companies we are working for or create our social ventures. We can get involved in NGOs either in our home countries or abroad to advance international development. There are so many ways to have an impact — all we need is both awareness and motivation. I am convinced that platforms like the Youth Assembly and Ideas for Action make a huge difference by giving us those two things: in short, the desire to act.
