5th International Seminar on Communication, Development and Human Rights

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, of the United Nations, is a new strategy integrating the three dimensions of sustainable development – the economic, social and environmental – aimed at eradicating world poverty. Moreover, the UN has announced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be met by all member states and institutions. These goals include ensuring quality education, achieving actual gender equality and fighting for sustainable consumption and production.

Achieving these 17 goals is an immense challenge and, for this reason, the Mediterranean Communication Observatory (OMEC) is intending to clarify how communicators can help reach the SDG. For that purpose, the OMEC is running a project under the name of “The role of communicators as SDG promoters: evaluation, awareness-raising and training in Communication degrees”. This project was one of the successful proposals for the 33^rd call of the Solidarity Fund by the Solidarity Autonomous Foundation (FAS).

The seminar on 15 November is aimed at raising awareness among the university community of the new United Nations 2030 Agenda and the SDG, as well as highlighting the important role of communicators in sustainable development, social change and respect for human rights.

The OMEC chair, Teresa Velázquez, and FAS chair, Jordi Prat, will be giving an opening speech to start the seminar off. Then, three different speakers will talk about sustainable development and communication, and will also deal with other subjects such as: the evolution process from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals; the right to access information; how the spreading of information and communications technology and global interconnectedness has great potential to accelerate human progress. In the afternoon, three more speakers will describe their experience in the communication and development field with the UAB students. The speakers will also talk about how communication has become a tool with a view to transparency in 2.0 organizations and how did the communication strategy by the municipality of Barcelona for the “Anti-rumour Network” project first started.

A series of workshops about communication and sustainable development have been organized to go deeper into the topic, by Thomas Tufte, Luis M. Sirubal, Arantza Diez (Institut Català de les Dones and Consell de l’Audiovisual de Catalunya) and BCN Acció Intercultural.

Enrolment is free and the attendees at the seminar will be provided with a certificate of attendance. Please, click here to see the seminar programme.