Designathon Works on the SDGs
Today, 24th October 2021, is United Nations Day, and it marks the 76th anniversary of when the United Nations Charter entered into force. The theme for this year is Building Back Together for Peace and Prosperity. Under this flag we want to take the opportunity to highlight the work that the Designathon Works team and its partners around the world have been doing in support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For the past 7 years, Designathon Works has been engaging children (ages 8–12), around the world to tackle tackle complex global problems aligned to the SDGs. These SDG Challenges or design hackathons range in topics from Climate Action to Poverty, Equality and Biodiversity.
Our work is not just about teaching children about the problems in the world but offering them open-ended processes where they use their creativity to design solutions, build prototypes with simple technologies and present their concepts to their class, and/or audience and an expert panel. Depending on the setting. We also coordinate virtual exchanges between students in different countries to promote empathy across lines of difference (geographic, gender, race and class).
We have reached over 100,000 children in over 45 countries, who have created ideas that contribute to a better world.
United Nations Day 2021 will also be observed as an Honor Day at the Dubai Expo 2020, focusing on programming that champions international cooperation and the SDGs for the Decade of Action. We are proud that Designathon Works was chosen as a Global Innovator by the World EXPO 2020 back in 2017, and will be participating in the Global Goals Week hosted in Dubai as part of the People and Planet Programme.
Let’s include children in this decade of action, with their concerns and their solutions!
A few examples of our topics and the amazing ideas our #ChangemakerChildren have generated:
Food and Climate, SDGs: 2, 3 & 13 | This team was a participating finalist of the Global Children’s Designathon 2019, in Istanbul, Turkey. The children noted that restaurants and especially self-service restaurants are a large source of food waste. Their invention tackles this problem through the ‘intelligent plate’ that warns individuals when they take too much food compared to how much they need (based on their age and physical requirements). The invention also offers reusable boxes to bring excess food home.
Clean Energy, SDG 7 | This team from Daloa in Ivory Coast came up with a solar powered irrigation system to draw water through pipes from a river and share the water to their cocoa farms. These children are all growing up in cocoa farming communities.
Corona Challenge, SDG 3 | This girl from Guadalajara in Mexico was the winner of the Corona Challenge 2021, Mexico. She designed her own mask to protect you from COVID infection, she made the prototype from recycled plastic bottles and materials in house.
