Poverty 2 Prosperity - Challenge Pack

The Challenge Packs will offer clear links with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) and opportunities for pupils to explore their understanding of the world’s main development challenges. Pupils will begin to create and refine their attitudes and values towards such development issues. The MDG’s promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases. The Millennium Development Goals Report 2009 highlights the need for a more active role to be taken: ‘Less than six years away from the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), the report warns that despite many successes, overall progress has been too slow for most of the targets to be met by 2015. And major advances in the fight against poverty and hunger have begun to slow or even reverse as a result of the global economic and food crises’ (www.un.org/millenniumgoals) . Engaging with the Natural Environment There are many opportunities within the Challenge Packs to create new connections or strengthen existing bonds with the natural environment at first hand. There will be scope to monitor and observe the local natural world, to explore the changes that have happened, are happening and are likely to happen. The work will also engage with individuals and organisations that have a more in-depth understanding, experience and appreciation of the natural environment. The wider value of this project will be that pupils can share their experiences with other young people in the UK, Bulgaria, Ghana and Hungary, to learn from each other and importantly, to give their experience a local, regional, national and global context. The Government initiative to create Sustainable Schools by 2020 believes and advocates sustainable living; it promotes global thinking alongside local well-being and believes schools play a massive part in securing a better future for children and their communities. P2P addresses the Sustainable Schools agenda by equipping children with the skills they need to be part of ‘development solutions’ and by encouraging them to contribute positively as part of their local and global communities. ‘Sustainable development means much more than recycling bottles or giving money to charity. It is about thinking and working in a profoundly different way.’ DfES Sustainable Schools for Pupils, Communities and the Environment, 2006 10