Cycle of events at Fieldgen School: 6 sessions to raise awareness of planetary health

From 21 February to 27 March, MSF Luxembourg's Public Engagement teams ran a lesson module each week to raise awareness and get students involved in environmental and humanitarian issues. While the first module focused on raising their awareness of MSF's work around the world and the way we operate in Luxembourg, the following modules were used to set up a condensed version of Call to Action, an inter-school competition aimed at highlighting forgotten crises.

Call to action: a solidarity challenge on global health

Students were encouraged to form groups of 3 to 5 to take part in the Call to Action. The challenge involved producing a communication medium to raise public awareness of a forgotten humanitarian crisis. Several formats were proposed: poster, podcast, video, etc. to give them creative freedom.

During this module, our team invited the students to look at one of the key themes MSF Luxembourg is raising awareness of: planetary health. This global approach to health looks at the links between human health and the health of our ecosystem. It allows us to tackle subjects linked to climate change and biodiversity, while at the same time raising young people's awareness of forgotten crises.

Raising awareness of a forgotten crisis: mobilizing young people around malaria

During the following sessions, all the groups of students chose to focus on malaria, a largely neglected disease that is still little known to the general public, despite 249 million cases and more than 600,000 deaths by 2022, mostly among women and children under the age of 5. Everyone was determined to learn more about the disease, but above all to contribute to greater knowledge on the subject by informing their friends and family.

At the end of all the preparation and research sessions, 6 groups presented their communication materials: posters, logos, announcements over the school's public address system, etc. All were fully committed and went beyond their comfort zone to come up with hard-hitting materials that would generate discussion with the other students in the school, their friends and family, and even with children in halfway houses or patients in doctors' surgeries.

This Call to Action gave the young people a vision of what they could do to raise awareness of forgotten crises and work towards better patient care. It was an enriching experience for them, opening up new channels of thought and communication that they had not necessarily been aware of.

It was great to be able to learn more about MSF and malaria, but also to think about how we could help and talk to other people about the disease.

We also learnt stories about people close to us who have experienced things we didn't know about... a real group project.

Students in the module