Year 9 students have been exploring issues of poverty alleviation and sustainable development in their Humanities lessons.
They played the ‘Trade Game’ in the hall, where groups of students represented a country or nation and were allocated wealth and resources that accurately reflect that countries real economic situation. The countries then had to trade with each other in an effort to make the most profit, which soon put many of the teams representing developing countries into difficulty.
One student said: “We thought this would be an easy game at first, but we soon realised that we weren’t going to be able to make any money. It wasn’t fair, because some of the other teams started with loads more than we did, and then they just took everything we had.”
Geography Learning Co-ordinator Charlotte Cook said: “This is an eye-opening exercise for the students, because it clearly highlights the economic differences between the global nations and the very real problems that developing countries face. Many students were quite genuinely concerned when they learnt about the huge amounts of debt that developing countries have hanging over their heads “.
The students then learnt about the concept of fair-trade and the work done by the fair-trade foundation to ensure that growers and producers in developing countries have access to fair markets under better trade conditions. They produced leaflets explaining the significance of the fair-trade mark and where people should look to find popular fair-trade products such as chocolate, bananas, tea and coffee.
Academy staff also played their part. Members of the Oasis Hub team engaged in a ‘fair-trade fast’ where they committed to only eating certified fair-trade products for one whole week.
Hub Development Worker Jen Conlan said: “Whilst this could seem like a really tough challenge, we actually wanted to do this to highlight the increasingly wide variety of fair-trade products on offer, such as museli, rice, pasta, fruit, chocolate and wine. We were hoping for staff and students to support us, by trying at least two new fair-trade products they’ve never used before.”
The Hub team also held a tea party event in the staffroom, where staff could come for cups of fair-trade tea and coffee, and take part in a raffle to win some fair-trade wine. All the proceeds went towards the Academy’s nominated charity Stop The Traffik, which works to stop illegal human trafficking – a problem that is particularly prolific in the Ivory Coast cocoa trade. The Academy supports Stop The Traffik’s campaign to encourage people to boycott all chocolate that is not certified as fair-trade.
-ENDS-
Aye mate! And welcome to limbo! Problem: I have no idea what page you're trying to work on. You need to define a body ID in the template, then turn on the necessary rows and columns in layout.css. Arrrrgh!