During the Belgian Fair Trade Week (1st to the 11th of October 2014), WFTO-Europe will organise a debate where students and young people from Brussels together with Fair Trade national actors will be invited to discuss the main challenges of Fair Trade and the way ahead. WFTO-Europe will organise this event in collaboration with Oxfam-en-Action, a group of young people engaged in Fair Trade, which benefits from a wide student network in Belgium. Other youth organisations and students from several universities will be invited to participate as well.
WFTO-Europe chose the students and young people as the target group due to their double roles in the society: as consumers and future Fair Trade ambassadors.
The main objectives of this debate are to deepen the knowledge on Fair Trade and to encourage people to be active and be Fair Trade promoters.
In order to do so, the debate will be divided in three different sessions. The first 30 minutes will be dedicated to a general presentation of the debate and the different national Fair Trade actors that will take part to it. Each of them will briefly introduce himself and his activity in his own country. They will also quickly introduce the working group they will lead during the second session, addressing questions raised by the students.
During this session, each FT actor will invite the students to deepen some specific topics in the respective discussion groups (at least 5). These topics will be previously identified through a consultation process amongst students and will be focused on the main challenges/criticisms of Fair Trade (how to promote FT in the current economic crisis in Europe, how to make trade rules and practices fairer, what is the impact of Fair Trade on producers,..). The FT actors will guide the students on the reflection and eventual elaboration of new ideas on how to face the issue. The discussions will be framed so as to identify solutions and, if possible, what Belgium-based young people could do. After twenty minutes, students will be asked to move to another group for a second round of discussion on a different topic.
The debate will end with a wrap up session where one person from each group (a student or the FT actor) will be invited to share insights or other results from the conversations had in the working group with the rest of the people.
Few weeks after the debate, WFTO-Europe will launch a survey to receive the feedback of the participants and to evaluate the impact of the event.
To discover other activities of the Fair Trade Week, please go to the CTB website http://www.semaineducommerceequitable.be/fr/
If you want to take part in the debate and to contribute to the identification of the topics to be discussed, please fill this survey by the 7th of September.
If you have any problem, please contact: projects[at]wfto-europe.org