Education for Popular Participation: My Role in Creating Positive Change and Fostering Sustainable Development
(Original)

Emmanuel Obiora Nwakeze
(Age 18, Nigeria)
Madonna University

Behold it was an Election Day; the day we were meant to fulfill our civic obligation. Until then, it dawned on me that I ought to exercise my franchise. But for this friend of mine, he simply opts not to. I was highly dumbfounded by this. Ignorantia affectata (Latin) never let him know this is one way he could contribute to the development of his community as an individual.

Sustainable development does not mean an increase in the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) and increase in the standard of living of the people alone, it encapsulate a number of political challenges and is not devoid of the individual and his quality of life in the society.

For this reason, I tip education for popular participation as the prerequisite step in attaining sustainable development. To foster this, I pioneered a voluntary youth movement early this year. Basically two reasons serves as the impetus that I feel goes beyond sheer patriotism and passion I have for my community here in Nigeria. One is to create a platform for youths and young people like me from where they could participate and play an active role in policy formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Second, was to create a prototype of such movement the young people like me would lead in our areas of professionalism in the near future to come.

However, as the leader of this movement coupled with the utmost desire to contribute to community development, I have on my agenda a project to carry out an enlightenment and educative program among the people of my community. For an author once wrote that “education is what the society needed most to survive”. But come to think of it, he is never far from the truth. For it is this same education that will produce that same medical experts that will take care of the same health needs of the society. It is this same education that will train the same experts in agriculture for food to sustain the same teeming population. This same education will provide same policies and theories that will guide the political arrangement of this same community. Through this same education, economic policies are formulated which is applied by administrators to paddle our boat towards fostering economic growth and sustainable development. To further vindicate how pertinent it is to the development process, UN designated 2005-2014 as the “UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.” If I could do this, I believe that I am playing a significant role in fostering sustainable development.

But the question that quickly comes to mine is: how could I, working together with my team implement this project? Though, implementing this is not seemingly easy as it appears. I however, choose to organize lectures, seminars, talk shows, workshop and at times evangelical teachings where we discuss thing affecting us and our community.

I as well, early this year embarked on the project of writing a book titled – “YOU AND YOUR ENVIRONMENT.” This book discourages people from constituting nuisance, buccaneers, and in fact from constituting a threat to the development of their environment. It tells them the why they should perform their civic obligations as part of their contributions to the development of their community.

As my dad will always say, the bedrock of creating positive changes in any environment is to first and foremost create that change in you. Thus, living an exemplary and worthy life is one of effective way of creating positive change in my environment. By performing my civic obligations which include; obeying the law and order, payment of tax (used in financing development projects by the government), exercise of franchise, etc, I believe I am contributing to sustainable development.

So play your part and I play mine well and together we shall sustain sustainable development. To this end, I will conclude with a poem below:

Rich and poor shedding the red tears
Like the tired tears of elephants
 Problems economic environmental social cultural
Never let them be.

Recovering from schizophrenia
I now realize that with education for popular participation
I could light up my dark community
Create positive change
Until these changes leaves no change to be changed

Chant it loud to the hearing of the deaf...