Education for Sustainable Development

Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (TU Delft) started an Open Educational Resource (OER) that includes courses on clean water technology for developing countries. These resources have been updated by universities in South Africa, Singapore, the Antilles and Indonesia to include information on water-treatment processes from their regions, making a collaborative resource on drinking-water engineering available online to anyone who wishes to learn more.

Since 2018, Cape Town, a city of 3.7 million people, has been experiencing an unprecedented drought. Cape Town’s water crisis was declared a national emergency when a decline in rainfall between 2015 and 2018 resulted in the worst droughts on record. The city announced a Day Zero – a point when the municipal water supply would be shut off. Thankfully, Day Zero never came, and the city’s largest water supplier, the Theewaterskloof Dam, was able to show an increase from 11 per cent of capacity on 9 March 2018, to 100 per cent on 2 October 2020 (Global Citizen, 9 October 2020).

In Poland, the Krajowy Fundusz Szkoleniowy - KFS (National Training Fund - NTF) was launched in 2014 as part of the reform of labour market services. Employers can receive funding to cover up to 80% of the costs of training and educating employees, while micro-entrepreneurs are entitled to 100% of the costs. Employers can use the National Training Fund resources to finance the diagnosis of training needs, courses, postgraduate studies and examinations (UIL, 2016).