Sustainability: So Close, Yet So Far Away by Barbra Kangwana 

With the 17 sustainable development goals, the United Nations made it easy for every person to contribute to sustainability. That even the laziest person can reduce their carbon footprint even by staying at home. Sadly, the person who stays at home does not even know about it. 

The biggest gap in achieving sustainability has been the lack of knowledge of it. Sustainability has become such a hard concept to grasp. It has become clouded in very expensive lifestyles and using certain products. Such a simple thing has been made very complex that it fails in the simplicity of ways it would have been achieved. The ones who contribute the most do not actually realize that they do. The ones who try to achieve it draw even further away from it. 

The shocking part is it also fails to appear in the books we spend most of our lives reading in school. It only crops up in a page or two in specific courses only at campus level and when it does, comes as the whole list of sustainable development goals. The furthest it gets beyond that is on the exam booklet. A whole generation of graduates that are considered to be ready for the job market are released into the world without knowing how they could possibly apply them. Engineers, economists, analysts and coordinators who can not simply apply to the concept of sustainability. The ones who were lucky to hear about it in school have an easier time as compared to those hearing it for the first time and have to struggle with the thought of learning it in the work space. 

With only 6 years left, it is hard to tell whether the 169 targets of the 17 Sustainable development goals will be achieved by 2030. This can also be attributed to the lack of knowledge of their existence. The SDGs are supposed to be adopted in all facets of our lives and all sectors of a country. There has to be a holistic approach in achieving sustainability. The easiest way is in cooperating sustainability in the curriculum. This will ensure a crop of professionals that have sustainability at the heart of their careers. 

Barbra Kangwana. 

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