Better by the Year?
Better by the Year? is a joint project by the
Centre for Global Education, York and International Service.
Do you think you could survive on less than $1 (60p) a day, feel constantly hungry and have no prospect of a job? Probably not, but more than 1 billion people across the world do and over 200 million of them are young people. Goal 1 of the eight
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aims to end this extreme poverty and hunger in all countries by 2015.
Agreed in the year 2000 by all 191
United Nations Member states, the picture in 2008 at just over halfway is mixed. The good news is there are less extremely poor people, more children attend primary school and last year under 10 million children died before the age of 5. But 10 million (down from 13 million in 1990) is still far too many and half a million women continue to die in pregnancy and child birth, while the number of AIDS orphans continues to rise (15 million in 2005). Half the world’s population lacks basic sanitation and climate change threatens to take away any recent improvements for the poorest. So still a long way to go! But it’s possible if Goal 8 a global partnership between rich and poor countries can really be made to work.
The
Better by the Year? website looks at the big global issues of today and explores the challenges faced by five developing countries,
Bolivia, Brazil ,
Burkina Faso ,
Mali and
Palestine in South America, Africa and the Middle East.
Aims of the project and website
- To offer an accessible way to interest and encourage KS3 pupils to engage with the big global issues of today for example continuing extreme poverty and hunger alongside unsustainable affluence. In exploring other countries across the world pupils will be able to recognise inequality and fairness and be motivated to act for a better world
- To support curriculum delivery in Citizenship, Geography and also ICT, RS and History
- To provide teachers with a comprehensive package of curriculum materials to meet the needs for a more global curriculum as indicated by the KS3 curriculum review
Better by the Year? is provided with support from: