UN under-secretary-general for global communication Melissa Fleming and CANIEM president and past IPA president Hugo Setzer at the December 3 news conference in Guadalajara announcing a newly formed SDG Book Club for Mexico’s young people. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
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Bologna’s 2025 Exhibition Tour Begins in Toulouse, Ends in Guadalajara
Sustainable Development Goals: Mexican and World Support
Today (December 3), both the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the Guadalajara International Book Fair have featured the United Nations‘ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The exhibition floor of the book fair gleams with its generous stands, nonstop author events, and entertainment performances—as much a reading theme park as a book fair, running through Sunday (December 8).
Organizers are putting key emphasis on the nonprofit educational Foundation SM carries a special emphasis on Mexican schoolteachers, noting that “Latin America and the Caribbean will need 3.2 million teachers by 2030 to achieve SDG 4, which is focused on “ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
And in a news conference today in the fair’s press center, the IPA has been joined by UN under-secretary-general for global communication Melissa Fleming and Mary Glenn, chief of UN Publications, the news being the arrival of the newest SDG Book Club, one for Mexico.
As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, the SDG Book Club was inaugurated in September 2018 with UN secretary-general António Guterres, Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, and International Publishers Association then-president Michiel Kolman.
Today’s opening of the Mexican chapter of the SDG Book Club brought together Kolman; his IPA successor Setzer; the current outgoing IPA president Karine Pansa; incoming president Gvantsa Jobava; and the UN’s Fleming.
Related article: ‘IPA and the UN Unveil SDG Book Club to Promote the Sustainable Development Goals.’ Image – Getty: Die Gograndi
The SDG Book Club, with its still-growing number of chapters in various parts of the world, issued its first reading list in April 2019 at Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and that show’s director Elena Pasoli was on-hand today for the news conference in Guadalajara, too.
And at the beginning, Fleming told members of the press this morning, “One of the ways we thought would be among the most impactful” to introduce the Sustainable Development Goals “would be through literature, especially to our young people, who are going to be inheriting our Earth.
“They have a stake in our future,” she said, “and yet they probably don’t know what those plans are that have been crafted at the United Nations.
“These are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. And these goals are actually very simple when you look at them, but they’re very not very well understood: They’re very complex when you go deeper into them.”
Fleming: ‘Serving the Greater Good in Our World’
Among IPA and UN speakers in the Guadalajara International Book Fair press conference celebrating the new Mexican SDG Book Club chapter — El Club de Lectura — are, from left, Michiel Kolman; Gvantsa Jobava; Melissa Fleming; Karine Pansa; and Hugo Setzer. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
Commending the work of 25 UN agencies now working to help the Mexican government implement elements of the SDGs on the ground, Fleming said, ‘We’re trying to just make our planet more livable, more equal, more humane. And where there’s more justice, we find that kids are so inspired by these SDGs.
“The idea [was] to launch with the IPA a book club to inspire not just children to read books that are linked to the SDGs, but also to inspire … new writers and publishers to commission books that are actually serving society, serving the greater good in our world.”
Related article: ‘The UN’s Melissa Fleming: ‘Summit of the Future’ and IPA’s Congress.’ Image: UN photo provided by the under-secretary-general’s office
As we wrote in our September interview with Fleming, “The SDGs now are understood to be facing profound challenges in meeting their achievement goals by 2030. In June, the journal Nature published a forceful argument that ‘The world should redouble its efforts on the SDGs, not abandon them.’
Fleming may well echo some of the promise of the SDG Book Club when she gives a keynote address on Thursday (December 5) at the IPA International Publishers Congress here in Guadalajara.
She noted today in the press conference that Oxford University Press’ 2024 “word of the year,” a phrase, actually, is brain rot, which “refers to a deterioration of someone’s mental or intellectual state due to over-consumption of low-quality content. … basically young people being on a trash information diet because of social media.”
The SDG Book Club, she said, is one effort to work against the trend toward “brain rot” in young people.
Teachers and SDG Number 4: Quality Education
Meanwhile, the Guadalajara fair itself moved forward Tuesday with the SM Foundation’s alarming news that teachers universally are leaving their profession within five years of starting their work.
Source: Foundation SM
According to the report, between 2015 and 2022, the dropout rates of primary education teachers doubled throughout he world, from 4.6 percent to 9 percent.
What’s more, remuneration levels, didn’t seem to make a difference in the overall arc of this data.
The Foundation SM presented 10 points that are needed to impact the relevant conditions under which teachers are operating, to slow down such attrition. Those are presented in the Spanish-language graphic here. It’s available at full size in this PDF format.
The points of the “Decalogue” graphic are focused on generating conditions for the well-being of the teachers, promoting teaching as a collaborative profession; favoring he professional development; and advocacy by teachers’ participation in decision-making elements of educational principles and process.
In a summation of the session, Cecilia Espinosa, director for Mexico at another Foundation, the YE, said, “Let’s move forward in welfare, justice, and peace.
“Without education, we won’t be able to transform our society and achieve common goals. This makes us excited to be with so many teachers today and share with them the ‘Decalogue,’ in which we see the conditions that should be given to those in the profession.”
At the 38th Guadalajara International Book Fair on December 3, one of the very largest publishers’ stands, the towering Grupo Planeta pavilion on the fair’s exhibition floor, just next door to Penguin Random House’s sprawling stand. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Guadalajara International Book Fair is here, more on the Mexican publishing market is here, more on publishing issues in Latin America is here, more on world publishing’s trade shows and book fairs is here. More from Publishing Perspectives on the International Publishers Association is here, more on the IPA’s biennial International Publishers Congress series is here, and more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and related programs and initiatives in book publishing is here.
Publishing Perspectives is the International Publishers Association’s world media partner.
Porter Anderson is the former Creative Advisor and Multi-Media Manager to the UN’s World Food Programme, posted to Rome HQ.