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As part of the ninth and last SDG Lab Community Coffee of the year, held on 15 December 2022, Globethics.net shared its experience and lessons learnt on “Integrating ethical performance excellence in Higher Education Institutions”. These Community Coffee meetups, organised by the Geneva-based SDG Lab, are events dedicated to exchanging success stories and ongoing work on implementing the SDGs.

Globethics.net’s main contribution to last week's event was to give insight into the Higher Education-Ethics Model of Excellence Tool (HE-EMET) as a practical contribution to achieving SDG 4 on Quality Education. Two recent pilot workshops in September and November 2022 with Ghanaian and Rwandan higher learning institutions highlighted the high level of enthusiasm in both countries, not only to embed ethics in higher education but also to advance its impact in society and beyond.

Professors and students from the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute expressed great interest in the topics discussed. They resonated with the Globethics.net proposal that ethics cannot be reserved for a single class or policy in the higher education environment; instead that it must be integrated and infused throughout all aspects of university life, from administration to teaching to campus life, thus moving from theory to practice.

HE-EMET is an online assessment platform for higher education institutions that aims to develop new competence in the sector by training senior staff to become ethics assessors and to undertake annual self-assessments of their institution through a series of interviews and desk reviews of internal processes and procedures.

Globethics.net Partnerships Lead, Christine Housel, presented Globethics.net’s mission on higher education and Senior Advisor, Nadia Balgobin, the HE-EMET. In sharing Globethics.net’s approach and concrete tools to drive academic excellence through ethics and sustainability as well as through leadership and governance, the Globethics.net team engaged participants in rich conversation. Fulfilling the very purpose of the SDG Lab, we were pleased to note that ideas for ongoing collaboration emerged for follow-up action throughout the meetup.

The SDG Lab is a multi-stakeholder initiative that contributes to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Throughout 2022 they convened 9 Community Coffees, bringing together close to 200 people representing academia (23%), government (5%), independent (8%), non-governmental organizations (21%), private sector (12%), UN agencies (25%), and other international organizations (6%) for the purpose of sharing knowledge and practice on health, education, gender equality, innovation, inequality, climate action and biodiversity, sustainable finance, citizen-generated data to strengthen collaboration for the SDGs.