Meloni tells 2nd Italy-Africa summit Mattei Plan new chapter in relations

(ANSA) - ROME, FEB 13 - Premier Giorgia Meloni on Friday told the second Italy-Africa Summit in Addis Ababa that Italy's Mattei Plan is a new chapter in relations with Africa. Meloni said Italy wanted to act as a bridge and to build solutions to the continent's problems together with the countries involved, with a respect that has often been lacking in the past. Meloni, who is co-chairing the summit with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, an event that features the 14 nations taking part in the ambitious plan and officials including African Union chiefs and UN head Antonio Guterres, said: "Two years ago, when I had the honour of hosting you in Rome, we made a very ambitious commitment: to write a new chapter in the history of our relations, to build a model of cooperation based on trust and mutual respect, a cooperation between equals, far from any predatory temptation and the paternalistic approach that has long distorted relations between Africa, Europe, and the West, and has often prevented our nations from understanding the extraordinary qualities and potential of African peoples." She stressed: "We've grown the Mattei Plan so much that today it's no longer seen as an Italian strategy, but as a synergy with international scope." With the Mattei Plan, the Italian premier said, "we are helping to revolutionize the way we look at Africa and consequently act in Africa." "Today, the Mattei Plan is a fully operational and structured reality, generating tangible results for our people. "It can count on a solid and innovative financial architecture, the fruit of valuable collaboration established with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and major international financial institutions. "In these two years, we have completed concrete projects with significant social impact, mobilizing billions of euros in public and private resources." Meloni announced that there would be meeting with Nigeria in June on a €5 billion education plan, saying the Mattei Plan focuses on human capital, starting in school. "Every project in the Mattei Plan is run by a common thread: a focus on education and training," she said. "Our goal is not to create new dependencies, but to support the leadership of African peoples and create real opportunities for redemption. "And this is only possible if we focus on enhancing human capital, starting in the earliest years of school. "That's why we launched, together with Nigeria, and in partnership with the Global Partnership for Education, a campaign to raise $5 billion to improve the quality of education for 750 million children in over 91 countries," Meloni said, announcing that she would be "happy to co-chair a summit on this issue in Rome in June with President Tinubu." Meloni told her audience "Let's not exploit migration for labour, let's fight its causes" and said "the Mattei Plan is a responsible choice, not a convenient one." She said: "We are not interested in exploiting migration to obtain low-cost labour to employ in our production systems. Instead, we want to fight the root causes that push too many young people to leave the places where they were born and raised, preventing them from ensuring the contribution they would like to make to the progress and development of their nations. "It is a choice of shared responsibility, not of short-term convenience." Meloni said the Mattei Plan's approach is tied to "a completely new cooperation," a challenge "based above all on Africa's ability to live off its wealth, processing its raw materials and not allowing them to be plundered, cultivating its fields, providing jobs and prospects for its best energies, and being able to count on stable governments and dynamic societies." Meloni said the Italy-Africa Summit would make the Mattei Plan more effective saying that "its success depends on our ability to listen and correct mistakes". With the Plan, she said, Italy has followed "a method that does not rely on the arrogance of those who impose pre-established models from above, built elsewhere, that fail to take into account the needs of African peoples, but rather builds solutions together with humility and respect. "However, the goal of this summit is not to celebrate what we have achieved so far, but to discuss together what we can still do to make the Mattei Plan more effective, more concrete, and more relevant to the needs of the local communities. Because," she continued, "if there's one thing we've learned over the years, it's that the success of this initiative also depends on our ability to continue listening, on our willingness to correct course when necessary, to adapt, to learn even from the mistakes we make." "Taking inspiration from African wisdom," the Prime Minister noted that "no path is paved without encountering rocks, but it is thanks to those rocks that we can walk, thanks to those rocks that we can move forward. "We want to continue in this direction, knowing that the results we've achieved aren't the end point; they're essential seeds for generating a new, richer and more abundant harvest. "If we can maintain this approach and this outlook, then I'm convinced that we can all contribute together, each in our own role, to putting into practice the lesson taught to us by a giant of our time like Saint John Paul II, who said 'we are all truly responsible for everyone.' "We have given concrete form to a method that engages the best energies of the Italian people, in a team effort that devalues ;;the entire Italian system, partly present here today, and which I obviously thank: businesses, universities, the world of cooperation and research, a heritage of excellence that has worked in a coordinated manner to pursue a common goal." (ANSA). Read article...

By ANSA