Partnerships for the Goals

Have you ever had friends over for a play date? They come, you play all day, and time flies. Then, when they leave, you suddenly realise that your room is a big mess – and you’re the one who needs to clean it up, all by yourself. When you do things alone, you have less fun, it takes longer and the work feels much harder. If your friends had helped you tidy up before they left, tidying would have been so quick and easy, because many hands make light work.

It might be no fun to tidy your room by yourself but imagine for a moment that you had to tidy everyone’s rooms in your town or city. Or what if you had to tidy everyone’s rooms in the whole world? That’s completely impossible for one person. The obvious solution is that everyone should jump in and do their bit.

When people, communities and countries work together, we can all achieve great things. This is called forming partnerships. Partnerships are like teams. In a team, everyone does what they are good at doing so that, together, the team can do something that nobody would have been able to do on their own.

One person alone cannot solve climate change, feed a village or educate all the children in a city. With partnerships, the objectives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved. 

The way this works is very simple. Say one person invents something amazing that can fight climate change, but they don’t have the skills or money to make the invention and tell the world about it. They could team up with someone who has money to help them, someone who can build the invention and another person who is good at getting a message out and telling people about things. Not one of those people would have been able to do anything by themselves but in a partnership together they can change the world!

Recently, the fight against Covid-19 all around the world has also convinced people to work together. People who work for governments, doctors, nurses and scientists are collaborating to stop the spread of disease, create new vaccinations and find treatments.