Dear partners,
As the end of year approaches, we wanted to take a moment to share with you our plans for International Development Week (IDW) - Canada’s annual flagship public engagement initiative to inform, inspire and involve Canadians in its international development efforts.
We are pleased to announce that IDW 2022 will take place from February 6 to 12. During this week, we encourage you to join the celebration of achievements in international development. Events will be held across Canada in a hybrid manner, virtually and possibly in-person as well (consistent with COVID-19 public health guidance).
Building on the success of previous editions, IDW 2022 will have an overarching theme of #GoForTheGoals – a call to action for Canadians to support the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) throughout the year. This year, we wish to focus attention on 5 sub-themes that reflect Canada’s international development priorities and the SDGs (with suggested theme “days” for each topic): Gender equality (Monday), Health (Tuesday), Economic Resilience (Wednesday), Education (Thursday) and Climate Action (Friday).
In the spirit of involving Canadians in international development, we encourage you to make the most of this unique tradition and engage your communities, partners and colleagues in learning, sharing and collaboration. To this end, we will be soon sharing with you a communications kit that will include IDW 2022 key messages, a set of visuals as well as tools and guidance on how to organize public engagement initiatives.
In the meantime, stay tuned as we post content using the #GoForTheGoals and #IDW2022 hashtags to create momentum towards International Development Week 2022. You will find a variety of shareable material on our social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and our brand new Instagram development account @devcanada) and web platforms. We invite you to join us in sharing and using the hashtags (#GoForTheGoals; #IDW2022) in your posts to raise the visibility of your IDW messaging and events.
Finally, we encourage you to share with us information on your IDW2022 activities so that we can showcase them on the Global Affairs Canada’s IDW webpage. Likewise, if you wish to invite a Global Affairs Canada senior official to any IDW events, we encourage you to share your plans with us as early as possible (and copying your respective Project Team Lead). To contact us, please feel free to send us an email at SDI-IDW@international.gc.ca .
Looking forward to celebrating IDW together,
The IDW team