17.05.2024

by: Andrea Spinelli Barrile | 17 May 2024

With the A Brighter Future project, the Link2007 organisation, and the NGOs that are part of it, are concretely committed to putting all the experience gained over the years on the ground, focusing on the promotion of human capital through training, which is essential to create decent and sustainable opportunities for work and growth, both in the countries of origin in Africa and in Europe. The Afro-European cooperation of the A Brighter Future project aims at enhancing, by building regional partnerships, the human capital of young Africans, seen as ‘the most valuable resource for sustainability’, as Roberto Ridolfi, president of Link2007, said during the project presentation.

A Brighter Future was launched at Codeway, the Italian cooperation fair in Rome, with a view to proposing new long-term policies and interventions not focused on the contingent emergency, and immediate results, in the field of migration and development: the aim is to tackle the complexity of migration processes, which ‘80% of which are internal to the African continent’, as Jean Leonard Touadi recalled during the presentation panel at Codeway, understanding in the approach their close link with development processes. In a word: diaspora.

‘Financial remittances are important, but remittances of expertise are even more so,’ said Marco Rusconi, director of the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS): ‘We are a country that is a powerhouse of know-how and expertise, we must work on this’. With a view to intercepting, and riding on, the great global impacts that the African continent will have in the near future, economic, demographic and otherwise, ‘we must learn to look at migration as an opportunity’, as Assafrica’s director general, Letizia Pizzi, put it. According to Pizzi, ‘African demographic growth represents opportunities for development in the training of young people, to make them protagonists on the continent’ and thus also mitigate the impacts of migration.

Seen from a more African, or at least diasporic, perspective, the issue is vital. As, also, rather obvious: ‘Our skills are something important that is often not valued in Italy. They are a fundamental aspect that is often missing in the migration-development nexus. Remittance‘, understood as “survival support”, is an important part but it should be put on a level that concerns support and not only economic development,’ said Bertrand Mani Ndongbou, president of the Italian Coordination of Diasporas (Cidci). ‘As a diaspora we network a lot, we collaborate with families, organisations, communities, to set up projects and businesses and support the community itself. At the centre is always the person,’ he clarified, however, expressing some doubts about the absence of diaspora representation in the Mattei Plan’s steering committee: ’There are eminent personalities from the diaspora who have not been involved. I do not say this with polemical intent, mine is a simple observation’.

A Brighter Future, explained Annachiara Moltoni, director of the NGO Elis, is a ‘model that can be implemented immediately’ and represents a ‘toolbox to face the future through a systemic approach to the labour market, which goes to capture studies, mappings that tell us where the market is saturated, in which sectors, therefore, to turn to and in which markets’.

The article was published on Africa and Affair HERE