The academic year 2023-2024 marked the first edition of the micro degree ‘Sustainability Coordinator’, a collaboration of CIFAL Flanders and HOGENT. 52 students enrolled to build their competences on SDG-implementation. Maya De Deyn, Marijke Janssens and Peter Wollaert of CIFAL Flanders are part of the team of lecturers. You can find more information about the micro degree on the website of HOGENT.

Some facts about the Micro degree:

Three lectures of the course ‘the UN and Sustainable Development’ were taught by Peter Wollaert, Managing Director of CIFAL Flanders. The content included an introduction to the UN system, a comprehensive overview of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, followed by some critical reflection and a practical exercise using the SDG Wheel.

Two important transversal pillars throughout the SDGs are SDG 16 (Peace, Partnerships and Strong institutions) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the goals), these are the focus of this course. Marijke Janssens, Project Manager at CIFAL Flanders is the lecturer for part of this course. The lectures revolved around (local) partnerships for the goals, international cooperation, and international solidarity. The final topic was extended by a guest lecture from 11.11.11 on international solidarity.

During the course ‘Project Sustainability Coordinator’, the students can apply all the theory they accumulated during the other courses on a real organisation, Mariasteen. The co-lecturer of this course is Maya De Deyn, Project Manager at CIFAL Flanders. The project consists out of identifying material topics for the organisation, holding stakeholder surveys, organising a start-to-sdg workshop, developing an action plan and much more. In short, the students learn how to be a real sustainability coordinator within an organisation.