By Merritt Frey, Executive Director

The first submissions for the Speech Up! Video Contest have started rolling in! As students start to prepare for winter break, we hope you are pondering your own entry and how to make it awesome. If you haven’t yet started thinking about your video, read on to get your thinking going….

In the Speech Up! Video Contest, high school students create a video speech addressing this year’s theme (see below) in 4 minutes or less. We encourage you to be creative, passionate, and emphatic as you make the case for your ideas on improving education. The specific them this year is:

Theme: The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4.1 states: “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.” What are the three most critical changes to the status quo you would propose to help achieve that goal in low-income countries like Mali?

Don’t know where to start? We have some great student resources to get you thinking about the barriers to education and various solutions others have proposed. Read through some of these resources and decide which solutions you think would make the largest difference (and why you think that!) or propose your own, totally new ideas. As a student, you know first-hand what it will take to make the system work better for everyone.

To get you started, I suggest reviewing this short article, which summarizes 10 barriers to education around the world. Then, ponder how you would propose to break down one or more of those barriers and use that idea as the seed for your video! For example, one of the barriers they describe is the distance from home to school for many children — Mali Rising’s plan to breakdown that barrier? Build more schools!

Can’t wait to see what you come up with for solutions…maybe you’ll set Mali Rising’s next priorities for education!