STAND Global Issues Courses

STAND Global Issues Courses

Looking to increase your ability to think critically, build a strong community with your peers and work to change your life and the world around you? Then the online STAND Global Issues courses are for you! 
Social change, and a better world, happens when a mere 25% of people get behind an idea. Figuring out how to get involved can be challenging. Our certified courses provide an excellent starting point. 
The Global Issues courses will deepen your understanding of social justice issues through a series of six online evening sessions plus one in-person session with expert facilitators. All students, no matter your major, are invited to join in.
As a Global Issues courses participant, you have the opportunity to meet other students, attend interactive workshops, talk about the issues you care about, and have new experiences through reflection, debate, and action.

Applications for the 2024 spring Global Issues courses are now closed. Interested in participating in our next Global Issues series?

Participants experiences

“I now can examine complex issues and evaluate different perspectives and solutions. Most importantly, I have developed a sense of global citizenship and responsibility, which has encouraged me to engage with global issues and become an active agent of change in my community.” – Siddhanth, 2023 participant.
“The connections made within the group, excellent facilitation and well-chosen activities created a space where everyone opened up to explore subjects in an honest and safe way” – Michelle, 2023 participant. 
“This course exceeded my expectations. I expected to learn a lot, which I did, but I didn’t expect the level of inspiration that would stem from each session. Each week, I left feeling motivated. Despite the exploration of challenging topics like migration, climate change and various global issues, ways on how to make change were depicted through really engaging methods, making it easier to digest new information and understand new concepts.” – Chloe, 2023 participant. 

Who are the 2024 facilitators?

Vicky Donnelly: Vicky works in Global Education and anti-racism programs, with schools, colleges, service-providers, and youth and community groups around Ireland. As an outreach and education worker with Financial Justice Ireland and Green Schools, she supports learners to explore and question dominant narratives about growth and ‘development’, as well as looking at root causes of global poverty, including unfair trade, debt and tax systems drives inequalities and environmental harm.
Adedotun Adekeye: Ade is a Nigerian that has been living in Ireland for over 16 years. He has been working in the Development Education sector as a Facilitator for over 14 years. A seasonal feature writer for 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World. As a poet, he was a featured reader at Over the Edge in Galway twice and had a poem published in the first edition of Skylight 47 (Galway Poetry Magazine). He is a Drama facilitator: skilled in Forum Theatre methodology and a Storyteller. A Galway “blow-in”, an engineer by profession and a trained translator, a man of many hats!
Jen Harris: Jen is the founder and CEO for the Waterford Sustainable Living Initiative (SLí), a development education organisation operating in the South East of Ireland, and also serves as a supervisor for the Professional Masters In Education programme for the University of Galway and Hibernia College. Ms. Harris holds an MA in Education and an MA in Development as well as a Post Grad in Innovation and Enterprise Development. Jen’s work focuses on responsible consumption and sustainability and how they intersect with climate change.
Fiammetta Bonfigli: Fiammetta is a Professor and Researcher with international experience in the field of Sociology of Law, State Crimes and Transitional Justice, Law and Social Movements. Ph.D. thesis in Sociology of Law defended in 2014 at the “Cesare Beccaria” Department of the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy). Master’s degree at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law of Oñati, Spain (2011). Currently, she holds a position as a post-doc researcher at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History of the University of Vienna (Austria), where she also teaches courses on Transitional justice, Legal Sociology and Legal Anthropology, and Social Movements and the Law. 
Shane Murphy: A postdoc researcher currently working in Dublin City University and Maynooth University, covering topics such as extremism, conspiracy theories, and online radicalisation. His work has focused on communities such as Incels and the Far Right in Ireland, often employing an engaged approach that involves reaching out to members of these communities, in order to better understand their ideologies, and the processes through which they come to hold extreme beliefs.
Caoimhe Butterly: Caoimhe is an educator, psychosocial support worker, documentary maker and an Irish peace activist who has worked with social movements and community projects in Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon for over 20 years. She has spent the past number of years working with refugee and migrant communities in Calais, the Balkans and Greece. Active with anti-racism and migrant justice organising in Ireland, she uses documentary film-making as a medium for witness and advocacy.

Liberia: the energy to end extreme poverty

Liberia: the energy to end extreme poverty

Growing access to electricity in Liberia can be the key to development, writes ROISIN CARLOS (Photograph by Dominic Chavez / World Bank)

Limited access and an unreliable electricity supply is not just about rolling black outs. Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is vital to ending extreme poverty, and yet around 1.1 billion people still live without out it in the world today.

Progress in Africa remains especially slow. Demonstrating this, the Afrobarometer survey presents a stark picture of household connection to electricity in Africa. Only 25% of the continent is always connected, 30% suffers poor access, and 45% have no access to electricity at all. Break down this figure further and we see that 589 million people do not have access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 30 African countries suffer endemic shortages.

Energy poverty acts as a major obstacle to development in the continent, with real consequences upon a plethora of human development indicators including economic growth, health and the environment. No other African country best presents the realities of these consequences than Liberia. With only four million people with electricity access and less than 1% of the population connected to grid power, Liberia holds the title for the lowest access to electricity in the world. This devastating access rate can be explained by numerous factors, including the widespread destruction of existing infrastructure during the 16-year civil war. In fact, it is only since the end of the civil war in 2003 that the Government finally began rehabilitating the badly damaged electricity connections. As a result, in 2006 electricity was restored to parts of Monrovia for the first time in fifteen years. Consequently, Liberia is reeling from the implications of limited electricity access, particularly in the economic, health and environmental sectors, leading the government to declare an ‘electricity national emergency’ in 2012.

Energy consumption, economic growth and employment generation are all positively correlated. In a country where 76% of the population has an income of less than 1 USD a day, solutions need to be found to drive economic growth and employment generation. Electricity access, by acting as a tool to unlock greater productivity in the workforce, can be instrumental in this regard. However, the key to unlocking this potential is to first invest in energy infrastructure for increased access to energy in order for the economy to grow.

The energy challenge has been equally critical in the delivery of healthcare in Liberia. In a country characterized by extremely dispersed and rural populations, limited electricity has been detrimental to the development of health care centers in rural areas. Healthcare is systematically undermined when it is dependent upon electricity access for motorizing technologies, keeping medicines cool or using sterilization machines. We need not look any further than Liberia’s devastating experience of the 2015 Ebola outbreak, in which everyone one of Liberia’s fifteen counties reported cases, to understand the importance of the delivery of advanced health care.

Consideration of the sustainable development of the country would be incomplete without mention of the environmental impact posed by energy access. As a result of limited electricity, the vast majority of the population rely on informal systems such as household-scale diesel gensets and biomass for basic energy services. However, substitute fossil based fuels present serious negative impacts including deforestations, increased green-house-gas emissions, and loss of biodiversity, in addition to health concerns created due to poor air-quality.

In the words of US President Barack Obama when launching the US funded Power Africa in 2013, “You’ve got to have power”. The solution seems clear: unleashing the energy potential of Liberia. Indeed, Liberia has the power potential in the form of renewable energy. This solution has been duly recognized, as today there are numerous examples of high-profile initiatives being rolled out to tackle the heart of this problem, including USAID’s Power Africa Initiative, the African Development Bank’s Energy for Africa, or the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), among others, along with national strategies to meet the seventh Sustainable Development Goal.

Promoting access to electricity through renewable energy can and will be a key to development in Liberia, and in extension in the continent of Africa. Renewable energy not only responds to the population’s needs, fueling economic growth and access to health care, but it also has the added incentive of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, positively impacting the sustainable development of the country.