Northbridge student ambassadors attend global UNICEF summit in New York

The UNICEF summit occurs over five days each summer and this year, student ambassadors from around the world came together to discuss multiple aspects of this years chosen topic - “building back from COVID” and education in a post-COVID society, specifically focusing on SDG #4 ‘Quality Education and the rights of children.

On the first day we had a workshop on education, discussing the importance of media literacy and possible solutions to misinformation, such as “Factivisms”. On the second day, we were given the chance to work with adults from different organizations and NGOs who helped give insights as to how education could be built back, as well as the significance online learning now presented to us. On the fourth day, we had a webinar from UNICEF. On the third and fifth days, we worked as a South East Asia region to come together to plan for an activity that would be possible during World Children’s Day. Celebrating the children but also give a lesson on important SDGs.

During the summit, one of the projects we did was creating a lesson plan to teach people about the current water situation of the Mekong river. Using the knowledge that we learnt from the workshops, we hope that there could be actions to spread awareness of the need to preserve the Mekong river within our school and hopefully also outside of our school community through many different activities which are inclusive and informative for all. We believe that this is an important topic that needs to be raised awareness about because of the significant role that the Mekong plays for countries in Southeast Asia, including the country in which we currently reside.

Gyubin - Throughout this event we gained the mindset to want to create change, starting with our plan for World Children’s Day. I’m greatly looking forward to developing the lesson, teaching students about the Mekong and the importance of water quality in an age of rapid development.

Seo Yun - The biggest takeaway I had was learning how to make an advocacy plan. More specifically, learning to consider both the positive and negative stakeholders when creating a plan in order to make sure that our plan has a positive impact on the majority of the stakeholders, and to make sure our plan succeeds. What I really enjoyed about the summit was talking to different students from other parts of the continent and learning about how the same problem would be solved differently in their country and community compared to how it could be solved here, in Cambodia.