He bent down to receive the children’s gifts, encouraged them, visited the classrooms and the sports field of their rehabilitated school: during his stop at the Vridi Canal school complex, in Abidjan, President Mattarella, traveling in Africa in these days, has shed new light on an emergency that affects everyone: education. It is the cornerstone of every development plan because it has to do with all the major issues of today, the demand for peace and stability, the need to govern migratory flows, the economic crisis, the provocations posed by artificial intelligence. There is no sensitive issue that does not ultimately land on the need to guarantee access to quality education for all.
Yet education budgets in nearly half of low-income countries have declined since 2020. The school visited by Mattarella is only one of the 700 Ivorian schools involved in a vast multi-year program managed by AVSI, financed by various donors (McGovern Dole Food for Education programme, Eni, Fondazione San Zeno) which has allowed the rehabilitation of the structures, but also the training of human resources, with specific training for teachers and the reference community. Away from media attention, approximately 200,000 children have been reached in a widespread way with educational activities and mobile libraries in the last three years in 11 regions of the country. By choosing to meet some of them at their school, the president reiterated in practice that there can be no development if we do not invest in quality education, which for us is always the integral education of the person. But with a note: for us, education is not only instructing, teaching reading, writing and arithmetic (essential aspects), but also accompanying the child in socio-emotional learning, once morest any temptation to drop out of school, protecting him above all in the most difficult contexts. It is a true educational path that is possible within a personal relationship, the only one that allows the person to discover his unique and unrepeatable value, to become aware of his own dignity and therefore capable of taking control of his life, so as to trigger a process of personal and community growth. This must and can happen in Abidjan, as in Italy.
Similar programs that work to make this possibility accessible even to the most vulnerable and in the most unstable places are numerous, they just need to be expanded and multiplied. The presidential visit relaunched them as a reminder to everyone: there are no longer distinctions between the North and South of the world from this perspective, either we all develop or none of us. We share the same ambition in Italy, Ivory Coast and elsewhere: sustainable and fair development.
*General Secretary of the AVSI Foundation
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2024-04-06 12:19:42
