Awareness and knowledge assessment of sustainable development goals among university personnel in Makerere University

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for sustainable development is one of the most ambitious and global agreements tackling the world’s most pressing challenges. Despite the significant progress over the past decades, SDGs are still limited by their knowledge and awareness especially among students. The existing efforts to assess the students understanding of SDGs are not efficient as they lack reliable, adaptive and holistic framework especially for the SDG performance assessment. The current study aimed at assessing the level of awareness, knowledge and perception of SDGs among Makerere university students so as to contribute towards the efforts aimed at the realization of the SDGs by 2030. The study further assessed the level of awareness, knowledge and perception of SDGs among Makerere university students. The study assessed the limitations to integrating SDGS among Makerere university students and it developed feasible solutions to developing students’ awareness and knowledge on the SDGs at Makerere University. Data was collected through field surveys, interviews and direct field observations; and then analyzed using thematic content analysis where descriptive statistics (percentages and frequencies) were generated in Microsoft excel spread sheets and then presented inform of tables, pie charts and bar graphs. The study findings revealed that 77.4% of the students had heard of the term SDGs but the 22.6% had never heard of the SDGs. The study also revealed that there was no significant relationship between the year of study and the student’s awareness of the goals. The student understanding of the meaning of SDGs, year of launch, name of the previous goals, the existing goals and the targets of the goals have P-values of .216, 0.18, 0.16, 0.21 and 0.10 respectively. This meant that the year of study has no significant relationship with the student awareness of the goals. The alternative hypothesis indicated that there was a significant relationship between year of study and student awareness and therefore this was rejected in favor of the null hypothesis. Basing on the fact that P>0.05, we therefore concluded that there is no significant relationship between year of study and awareness of the goals.