ROMA (ITALPRESS) – “Two years ago we took on a very ambitious commitment: writing a new page in the history of our relations, building a completely different model of cooperation, based on trust and mutual respect. A peer-to-peer cooperation, far from any predatory temptation but also from the paternalistic approach that, for a long time, has distorted the relations between Africa, Europe, the West, and has often prevented our nations from understanding the extraordinary peculiarities, but above all the extraordinary potential of African peoples.” Thus the President of the Council, Giorgia Meloni, opening the second Italy-Africa summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“We have given shape to the Mattei Plan for Africa, we have rooted it in our institutional systems, we have made it grow so much that today it is recognized no longer as an Italian initiative, but as an international strategy. This was possible thanks to the structured synergies that we have built together with the main agencies of the United Nations, together with the European Union, the African Union, the G7, to the many partners who share our vision, from Europe to the Gulf, passing through East Africa. In doing so we have the presumption of believing that we are contributing to revolutionising the way of looking at Africa and consequently acting in Africa.” “Today the Mattei Plan is an operational and structured reality, which generates tangible results for our peoples, which can count on a solid and innovative financial architecture, the result of the precious collaboration we have established with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the main international financial institutions,” he added.
“In these two years we have started and concluded concrete projects of great social impact, mobilizing billion euros between public resources and private resources, and we have done so giving concreteness to a method that involves the best energies of the Italian people, in a team game that enhances the whole system Italy – companies, universities, world of cooperation and research – a heritage of excellence that has worked in a coordinated way to pursue a common goal. This goal is not to implement a simple package of projects, but it is to give shape to a pact between free nations, us and you, who choose to work together because they trust each other and know how to find together the areas of collaboration in which to make the difference, in a perspective of shared benefits. It is a method that builds concrete solutions, is realized in fast times, generates verifiable benefits especially in the strategic areas for our common growth“, Meloni stressed.
“The challenge of a completely new cooperation that we have given is mainly based on the ability that Africa can experience its wealth, process its raw materials and not let them be depreated, cultivating its fields, giving work and a perspective to its best energies, being able to count on stable governments and dynamic societies. We do not care to exploit migration to have cheap labor to employ in our production systems. Instead, we want to fight the deep causes that push too many young people to leave the place where they were born and grown, and that prevent them from making the contribution they would like to make to the progress and development of their nations,” he explains. “It is a choice of shared responsibility, not of short-term convenience. We have done all this – he emphasizes – following a method that does not pass from the arrogance of those who impose from the high preconstituted models or built elsewhere, that do not take into account the instances of the African peoples, but that on the contrary builds together solutions with humility and respect”.
“The goal of this summit is not to celebrate what we have done so far, but it is to reason together what we can still do to make the Mattei Plan more effective, more concrete, more adhering to the needs of the territories. Taking inspiration from African wisdom, no path traces without encountering stones, but it is thanks to those stones that we can walk and move on. We want to continue in this direction with the awareness that the results we have achieved are not the point of arrival, they are indispensable seeds to generate a new crop, richer and more abundant. If we can maintain this approach and this look, I am convinced that we can all contribute together, each in its role, to make concrete the lesson that has given us a giant of our time as St. John Paul II, who said: “We are all truly responsible for all.” This is our approach, this is what moves us and we want to continue to do,” Meloni concludes.
– Photo Palazzo Chigi –
(ITALPRESS).
