What Mondo has been up to in Estonia

The year has had a busy start! After the great kick-off meeting where all the project partners met and discussed their ideas and plans for the three years, our M4D project team in Mondo sat down and started making plans for 2015 - the European Year of Development. We have also been working together with the Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) who are also a M4D partner organisation.

We started the year by posting letters and thematic calendars to policy makers and journalists. The letters were addressed to:

• All the 101 parliament members of Estonia;

• The prime minister and all the other 13 ministers of Estonia;

• 32 officials from relevant ministries (including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, Ministry of the Environment etc.);

• 6 members of the European Parliament representing Estonia;

• 50 selected journalists.

Letters in the envelopes introduced both EYD2015 and the M4D project, emphasising Estonia's role in international development cooperation and also touching on the Sustainable Development Goals. The envelopes also had a 2015 calendar in them that introduces the Sustainable Development Goals and different development cooperation projects taking place over the world.

January's social media theme "Europe in the World" was introduced by a video clip calling for action during the EYD2015. The message added to the video informed our Facebook "likers" about the EYD2015 and also incorporated the year's motto "Our world. Our dignity. Our future." in Estonian.

Right now we are preparing the political debate (on the 12th of February) that will bring together the major political parties of Estonia to see what are their views on development cooperation. As the elections will take place on the 1st of March, the debate will be right on time. 

Thanks to the good cooperation with ERR, the debate will be led by Indrek Treufeldt (a well-established TV journalist in Estonia) and live broadcasted online. We are also helping ERR to develop a thematic webpage.

Young people who are taking part of the Model UN arranged in spring will have a chance to meet politicians during the debate and also ask their own question. Prior to that they will spend the first half of the day learning about the Sustainable Development Goals.

In the coming months we will continue to grow our relationships with different media houses and newspapers and also meet with a creative agency to discuss future public campaign. We will also start preparing and planning our first bulletin to address policy makers in May.