Doing this exercise of the ‘UN’ style debate I found out lots of facts on SouthAfrica which I would have had no idea about. I didn’t know a lot about this country at all apart from the fact that people go there on holiday a lot ad they have a good rugny team! I was aware of the fact that there was a massive problem with AIDS/HIV and the basic structure of the whole country, eg the bits you see on the news; appartheid, nelson Mandella etc, but that was all. So when we started researching this country it was easy to find the basic facts, but it took a little while to play with ‘wording’ on the site engines to get any information up about the sustainable Development issues. Once we had sorted that out though we found vast amounts of information.
The end of appartheid in 1990 has completely changed tis country, before this the majority of the population were unaccounted for (so to speak), and now it is having to care for the whole population which has brought on huge changes & difficulties. However, South Africas Constitution is now regarded as one of the most progressive in the world.
Also, we found the South African Energy Policies for Sustainable Development, edited by Harald Winkler from the Energy research Centre, In University of Cape Town, and this showed policies that could happen, how easy they would be to implement, and the cost effectiveness of them. Both these items, I forgot to mention in the presentation!!
I think South Africa are definitely progressing well, but still have a lot to achieve to be on target for their ‘Vision’. Hopefully with the FIFA Wold Cup 2010 being held there, a lot of money will be invested wisely into the country which will give them a helping hand towards some of their targets.
By doing a presentation, we were able to not only find out about our own country through the research we did, but also find out all about the other countries policies and struggles which we had no idea about, (Imagine how long that would have taken us to research on our own!!). Eg, i now know that Denmark is the ‘elite’ in sustainable development, and all I can imagine now is that it looks like something out of the Honda advert..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXf5UUnLzwQ
The end of appartheid in 1990 has completely changed tis country, before this the majority of the population were unaccounted for (so to speak), and now it is having to care for the whole population which has brought on huge changes & difficulties. However, South Africas Constitution is now regarded as one of the most progressive in the world.
Also, we found the South African Energy Policies for Sustainable Development, edited by Harald Winkler from the Energy research Centre, In University of Cape Town, and this showed policies that could happen, how easy they would be to implement, and the cost effectiveness of them. Both these items, I forgot to mention in the presentation!!
I think South Africa are definitely progressing well, but still have a lot to achieve to be on target for their ‘Vision’. Hopefully with the FIFA Wold Cup 2010 being held there, a lot of money will be invested wisely into the country which will give them a helping hand towards some of their targets.
By doing a presentation, we were able to not only find out about our own country through the research we did, but also find out all about the other countries policies and struggles which we had no idea about, (Imagine how long that would have taken us to research on our own!!). Eg, i now know that Denmark is the ‘elite’ in sustainable development, and all I can imagine now is that it looks like something out of the Honda advert..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXf5UUnLzwQ
On the day of the ‘UN’ debate, i know everyone was very nervous. (Iknow I was). I’ve never stared at a table for so long!, but considering this, i think we all did really well. I agree that we all should have looked up more & not just read from our notes, but the fact we all did our presentations without passing out with fear was quite an achievement i thought.
I know the money went to the most deserved countries that needed it, but if it had been different and the money had gone to the contries that gave the best presentations, i think it would have been given to Cambodia & Malawi. I think they were the most confident speakers.
Despite the fact that I felt sick all day knowing I had to stand up and give a presentation I really did enjoy it. It will be good to do it again, and is a great way of learning the differences other countries face. Next time we all have to do this, i am sure everyone will be much more confident and will be far louder and ask more questions... bit more debate-style. I did think the whole group were really supportive of each other though.
Considering the handout was only to be 2 pages long, it was hard to compress all the research we had found into it. If I was to do it again, I would probably just put the main points down, and not describe it so much.
I like working as a team because you get the added bonus of ‘back up’ and Adam was good in the presentation. It was hard for us to meet up and collate findings because of work & other commitments, so we ended up mostly relaying information through e-mails, but seemed to work fine. We only met briefly to discuss what each of us was going to say in the presentation, and I think we should have gone through this in more detail to make our presentation flow better, but on the whole... I think we worked well.
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