About < SDGs

Sustainable Development Goals

The African Center for Aquatic Research and Education uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guide to help accomplish its mission and vision.

ACARE uses five SDGs as tools in its process to improve African Great Lakes health. Through the use of these five SDGs, three goals are directly impacted, and a further ten SDGs are indirectly impacted. The ultimate goal is to help achieve peace (SDG 17) by ensuring provision of healthy resources for healthy communities.

ACARE experts had to first categorize the SDGs as either tools, goals, or outcomes of successfully accomplished goals. For example, ACARE uses SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals as a tool to directly address other goals. When these goals are accomplished, other goals are realized (see below).

Process

ACARE administers a highly collaborative network of experts globally to systematically prioritize, study, and gather and exchange relevant scientific information to positively change policy and management on the African Great Lakes. ACARE is using SDG 17: Partnerships as a guide to strengthen science, enhance data and information, and information exchange, and direct valuable research resources around the AGL basins. All of this in an effort to positively impact the African Great Lakes through science-based decision making. 

One of ACARE’s major efforts is to enhance education and training of freshwater exprts in the African Great Lakes region, and globally, to address the challenges that negatively affect the AGL. ACARE’s collaborative efforts will bring together academic and training centers to create a comprehensive forum for strengthening knolwedge on freshwater systems.

ACARE is creating opportunities for women to engage in science, historically weighted towards men. The processes of networking and partnerships are at the core of ACARE’s mission, and we are developing opportunities for early career women and students to engage with the larger global freshwater community.

SDGs 14 and 15 are both a part of the ACARE process and will be directly impacted.

The experts in the ACARE process are largely freshwater experts and have dedicated their lives to addressing SDG 14 which is to protect water resources for sustainable use. Though this process is largely focused on water resources, it is understood that without eventually working with experts and decision-makers in other sectors, like land-based activities, our lakes will continually be polluted by runoff and other pollutants from terrestrial sources.

14: Protecting the biodiversity and ensuring sustainable use of the resources for the people who depend on them are the drivers for ACARE’s existence.

15: The health of all water bodies on the planet depend on what flows into them. Life on land and the activities that take place in the riparian communities around them will be critical.

Impacts

1: The intent of ACARE’s activities are to enhance the health and quality of these vast natural resources. Such resources as fisheries and clean water both contribute to reducing poverty through economic gain, especially on the AGL where fisheries are a large part of millions of people’s economy and extend up through the value chain into surrounding countries.

2: Enhancing the health and quality of these vast natural resources can reduce hunger through healthy fisheries which will increase productivity and catches for human consumption.

3: Cleaner lakes and sustainable resources within them will reduce poverty and hunger resulting in better nutrition and less sickness and poverty-induced stress.

7: Part of the overall plans for large lakes is to ensure their health on many fronts. Working with experts on hydro power, wind, and solar will help reduce polution and negative affects on the lakes.

8: The health of the AGL has, in the past, demonstrated that these resources increase economic growth through a variety of activities such as fisheries, transportation, and other water-related, land-based activities. Ensuring the health of the lakes increases the chances of these activities to continue.

9: Some of the biggest advances in Africa include activities surrounding aquaculture. Many of the freshwater experts already engaged with ACARE’s network are leading the way in aquaculture studies and innovations and will continue to do so and a more effective pace when working together.

10: Reducing inequality can occur on many fronts when discussing freshwater resources. First, when there are more resources, stronger economies, and well fed and healthy people, can reduce inequalities overall. The ACARE process in general will reduce inequalities through the inclusion of women and by incorporating the views and needs of higher leves of government and those who use the resources, at the village level around the lakes. 

11: Communities who depend on these lakes for their livelihoods need clean, sustainable resources. With stronger collaborations and science, cleaner lakes will ensure communities can depend on these resources into the future.

12: Freshwater experts, with the right resources and information, can assist in the responsible use of these critical waterbodies.

13: Climate change is affecting our natural resources in a variety of ways. One is the negative impacts on the ability to produce crops in arid areas of the world like Africa. This often causes a general human migration towards large, freshwater resources such as the AGL which have shown high rates of growth around the lakes’ edges. Attention to climatic impacts on riparian and freshwater resources will be critical in addressing the issues affecting these lakes.