The new Director Marco Riccardo Rusconi (Milano, 1972), appointed in recent weeks by the President of the Council of Ministers, has officially taken office at the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation.
Marco Riccardo Rusconi, who entered the diplomatic service in 1997, has held various positions, serving, among others, at the Italian Embassies in Cairo and Madrid, as Consul General in Montreal and as Permanent Representative to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), and as Diplomatic Advisor to the Minister of Ecological Transition. In the last two years and half he has directed the Africa Unit at the Directorate General for Development Cooperation, also acting as Deputy Director General/Central Director for bilateral development cooperation policies and emergency interventions.
“I begin this mandate animated by the spirit of the Italian law on cooperation, of whereby Development Cooperation is an integral and defining part of the Italian foreign policy”, such were the first words uttered by Director Rusconi. “The Agency is an essential instrument of cooperation, because with its network of Offices abroad it is able – in accordance with the guidelines of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – to identify the needs of partner countries and to implement high-quality initiatives and result-oriented projects based on a logic of equal partnerships. And the Agency can constructively channel that natural drive for cooperation that, as the President of the Republic recalled, is the collective heritage of our national community”.
The mandate begins at a time of growth for the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), which now has a budget of almost one billion, with a portfolio of European resources amounting to 400 million, 18 offices abroad, and is the main government body implementing and financing development projects, ready to offer its skills and structures in order to implement the Mattei Plan and strengthen Italian cooperation.