BINUS Festival Internationalization Session: Quick Path to Agenda 2030 Goals

This semester’s Internationalization session at BINUS Festival was held on 20 – 22 May 2021. To kick off the series of internationalization sessions, His Excellency Jari Sinkari, the Ambassador of Finland to Indonesia, Timor Leste, and ASEAN was the one appointed as the first speaker. He shared ideas and perspectives on “Quick Path to Agenda 2030 Goals: Examples from Finland on Education and Climate Action” at BINUS Festival held on May 20, 2021.  

BINUS University leaders were also present at the session. President of BINUS Higher Education, Bapak Stephen Wahyudi Santoso started this session by giving opening remarks. Relating to the topic, Bapak Stephen mentioned how BINUS UNIVERSITY has been supporting education innovations through various programs and activities. The session then was followed by the introduction of His Excellency Jari Sinkari to the audiences by BINUS Global Director, Dr. Diah Wihardini who also served as the moderator for this session.  

Following the introduction of the speaker is the main presentation itself by Ambassador Jari Sinkari. He started the presentation by shortly introducing Finland as a country to the audience. Then, he moved forward to highlighting Finland’s efforts to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in all its actions. Aside from mentioning the goals and efforts, he also emphasized that their SDGs implementation was constantly tracked through government reports and reported to the UN.

Ambassador Jari Sinkari then highlighted the key SDG progress of Finland, stating that Finland was close to reaching many of the SDGs related to social and economic sustainability. He then moved forward by focusing the talk more on education and climate action. The speaker then got more into detail about the characteristics of Finnish education, before concluding that the best practices of the education system in Finland can be shared and adapted by many countries.  

The speaker then continued his presentation by presenting more about climate matters as one of the SDGs. He was proud to mention that Finland is one of the first forerunners in climate action. Ambassador Jari Sinkari especially emphasized the importance of education, technology, and science, in finding solutions to tackle climate change, and that Finland offered circular economy, meteorology, energy efficiency among others. Finally, His Excellency in that among other things, this climate action initiative needs global collaborative action.  

A Q&A session was held following the presentations from Ambassador Jari Sinkari. Many were enthusiastic to know more about the collaborative efforts between Finland and Indonesia. This event gathered around 490 BINUS first-year undergraduate students in total and served as an opportunity for audiences to learn new perspectives of education innovation and climate action.