The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAENG) and Bobab have teamed up to deliver an exciting un-conference event. Together, we’ll be exploring challenges and opportunities faced by the global engineering community in working towards and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Focused on education, innovation and enterprise, we’ll bring together a diverse group of entrepreneurs, educators, engineers, students and innovators from across Africa and around the world to identify current issues and barriers to addressing the SDGs.

Over the course of the day, we’ll hear from expert panelists and facilitate a series of interactive workshops designed to help participants identify and articulate how they and the wider engineering community can do more to tackle the challenges of tomorrow, today.

Together, through peer-to-peer knowledge exchange and solution-sharing, we’ll create an essential toolkit for current and future generations of engineering innovators as they strive to tackle the great challenges of our time. 

In the build up to the event, we'll be canvassing attendees to help us identify the broad themes and focuses for the day. The morning session of the event will then be dedicated to highlighting and then narrowing-down on the problems we will explore, with the afternoon session focused on finding solutions to the issues participants have identified.

Throughout the day, participants will be encouraged to interact and engage with as many different people and challenges as possible. After each session, all participants will reconvene to feedback to the main group, ensuring that everyone benefits from the work and ideas of everyone else.

The outcome of the event will be a minimum of five stress-tested solutions to entrenched challenges, identified and owned by all of the participants. These will go onto form the core of our ‘Engineering the SDGs Toolkit’ - an essential guide for educators, engineers and entrepreneurs in mobilising the individual and collective efforts of the global engineering community to achieve the SDGs.