International cooperation, role of the Lombardy Region and national and local institutions, dedicated tenders and potential of the Mattei Plan: these are the main themes of the summit organized at Palazzo Lombardia, Friday April 5th, with the involvement of the Lombardy Development Cooperation stakeholders, the Directorate general for Development Cooperation of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and of the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS).
The meeting saw the participation of the director Marco Riccardo Rusconi and Stefano Gatti, general director for Development Cooperation of the MAECI, as well as the vice president of the Lombardy Region, Marco Alparone and the undersecretary of the Presidency with responsibility for international and European relations, Raffaele Cattaneo.
The meeting started from the awareness that Lombardy, an area with the greatest presence of NGOs, aims to relaunch development cooperation activities, consolidating relationships and reciprocity based on increasingly close collaboration also with national institutions. The 2023 Call is in fact the largest ever, so MAECI and AICS hope for the widest participation and the Agency is working hard to provide maximum assistance to potential proponents.
As underlined by director Rusconi, during his speech: “The territorial partnership is a leading tool for achieving the objectives of the 2030 Agenda as it allows us to identify priorities more easily, to respond more effectively to development needs economic, environmental and social of the territories, and to implement sustainable development programs consistent with these needs, through the active involvement of local actors who by their nature operate on multiple levels. It will be fundamental to design and implement quality projects, which will strengthen image and prestige of Italy in the field of development cooperation.”
“This was the opportunity – explained the vice president of the Region Marco Alparone – to focus on a model of sustainable development that passes through cooperation. The ‘Lombardy model‘ with all its actors, territorial and institutional, can make cooperation a network that brings development and human relations, fundamental in a particularly difficult season like this. Ours is a model that can also be exported at a national level, and which brings many excellences, especially in the field of international cooperation. Excellences that can and must work in synergy to bring about sustainable development that is made up of people.”
“Today – explained the Undersecretary of the Presidency with responsibility for International and European Relations, Raffaele Cattaneo – we wanted to bring all the protagonists of international cooperation activities to Milan. In this way we will also be able to use the tools and resources made available, starting with the tender opened by the AICS which allocates 60 million for local authority projects, but in the perspective of the Mattei Plan which makes 5 and a half billion available. Lombardy will be the leader of two projects dedicated to Tunisia and Tanzania and is a candidate to become a partner of a third intended for Albania, because the Balkan area is also important. After that we also want to seize the opportunities offered by the Mattei Plan of which the Lombardy system is a candidate to be an active part”.
