Over the past year, the END7 campaign has dramatically increased its base of student supporters at universities around the world. Students at dozens of universities have organized advocacy, education, and fundraising events, raising over $21,000 for END7 during the 2013-2014 academic year alone. The representatives of the END7 Student Advisory Board are hard at work planning a new year of on-campus activities to support the NTD control and elimination effort.
This year, the END7 campaign is involving students in promoting all of our online advocacy actions and providing them with resources to plan their own events on campus. September’s focus centers on the opening of the 69th United Nations General Assembly in New York – the starting point for the final round of deliberations that will finalize the post-2015 development agenda and adjoining Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs, which will succeed the Millennium Development Goals set in 2000, will play a key role in guiding international development and global health efforts over the next fifteen years. It is critical that a health target to control and eliminate NTDs is included in the final SDGs, not only to ensure that they are prioritized on national and global development agendas over the next fifteen years, but also because treating these diseases is necessary to ensure that our goals to improve nutrition, education, health and economic productivity are successful.
To that end, END7 has launched a petition targeting Ambassador Elizabeth M. Cousens, United States representative to the UN Social and Economic Council, asking her to continue to support the inclusion of NTDs in the SDGs as the goals are being finalized over the next year. To help us spread the word and collect more signatures on this important petition, we created a Student Action Kit to give students all the tools they need to be informed and effective NTD advocates: key facts about the United Nations and the SDGs, suggested tweets to promote the petition, ideas for events to help drum up support on campus, links to factsheets and a downloadable poster to spread the word, and even a Prezi presentation students can give to classes and club meetings.
Students have already made tremendous progress in their advocacy – in just one week, they’ve collected over 500 signatures on the petition, and our END7 Student Advisory Board representatives are poised to collect 500 more on post cards we printed with space for personal messages asking Ambassador Cousens for her support of the inclusion of NTDs in the SDGs. We know this outpouring of public support will send a strong message to the United Nations as we chart a course for the next fifteen years of international development efforts – a message that our generation is committed to seeing the end of NTDs.
We are so proud of our student supporters’ efforts to speak out on behalf of the poor and vulnerable communities most impacted by NTDs. If you (or a student you know!) want to get your campus involved, email me at to get started, check out our Ideas for Students, and join our .