Raising Awareness Campaign of the SDG4U project
The SDG4U Campaign included the organisation of 50 Events in all participating universities during the second year of project implementation, and particularly between March and December 2025.
4 major Events were co-organised by all partner universities.
All common events as well as numerous other events provided the option to be followed online, in hybrid and/or asynchronous modes; the reason was to promote sustainability by reducing travel and the related carbon footprint as well as to allow the Campaign to reach out to as many people as possible.
Overall, the Campaign was widely communicated in all partner universities, reaching the high number of almost 10.000 persons in all the partner universities together, while more than half of those persons actively participated in the all the events as a whole. The partner universities made an effort to address all 17 SDGs in the Campaign, however they emphasized on their areas of expertise.
All details available HERE.
Strategic recommendations
Environmental and economically framed SDGs are implicitly prioritised, while social justice, governance, and institutional SDGs show weaker learning outcomes. This reflects a pattern identified in UNESCO ESD evaluations, where environmental sustainability is more readily internalised than normative and legal dimensions. Incorrect answers consistently reflect:
- Perceptions on individual responsibility over structural change;
- Single-axis approach influenced by popular perceptions (e.g. gender) rather than intersectional equity.
The SDG4U post-awareness survey demonstrates clear successful baseline SDG awareness on environmental and economic aspects of sustainable development. However, it also reveals persistent conceptual gaps in rights-based inclusion, structural responsibility, and intersectionality/interdisciplinarity. Overall, the survey confirms the value of SDG awareness initiatives while highlighting the need to move from recognition to critical understanding and to addressing concepts and issues in a holistic way. Educational gaps on engaging in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches can also be identified. Based on the above, future recommendations for universities can be formed in two areas:
Recommendations on the Awareness Campaign
- Rebalance of SDG education to strengthen rights-based inclusion, governance, and institutional dimensions. Strengthen explicit teaching on SDGs 5, 10, 12, and 16.
- Adopt holistic approaches to teaching. Incorporating the SDGs into university curricula and using real-life examples, such as in the case of Campus as living labs projects for students can assist on awareness raising.
- Shift pedagogical focus from individual behaviour to rights-based, systems-level responsibility and policy coherence.
- Integrate intersectionality and underrepresented groups (notably disability) more explicitly.
- Introduce case-based learning to address counter-intuitive dynamics.
Recommendations on designing pre- and post-awareness surveys
- Include confidence intervals or minimum thresholds per question and per university
- Add short qualitative reflection questions to contextualize answers
