SAAM joins the the first seminar on academic cooperation between Africa and Spain organised by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation
On the 21st and 22nd of June, SAAM participates in the first seminar on academic cooperation between Africa and Spain. The event is hosted by the Diplomatic School and organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, Africa House and the Spanish Service for the Internationalisation of Education (Spanish acronym: SEPIE), attached to the Ministry of Universities.
The seminar has the objective of reuniting representatives of the African and Spanish academic sector and institutions in order to analyse the current academic cooperation and to think of ways of improving it. The pilot project SAAM has been invited to attend the seminar as it is a tool that promotes academic mobilities between both places.
The @Esc_espana hosts the first #Africa–#Spain academic cooperation seminar today and tomorrow. The seminar is organized by @MAECgob, @Casaafrica, and @sepiegob, and will be inaugurated by @manuelmunizv, State Secretary for Global Spain.https://t.co/ejURT7HL0b pic.twitter.com/KPELsfSqgm
— Spain MFA (@SpainMFA) June 21, 2021
The State Secretary for Global Spain, Manuel Muñiz, has been in charge of inaugurating the seminar, accompanied by the President of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities, José Carlos Gómez, and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of the Republic of Guinea, Binko Mamady Touré. The Minister for Sport, Culture and Heritage of Kenya, Amina C. Mohammed, has participated in online mode.
After the inauguration, the first panels of the seminar have been about existing legal and strategic frameworks relevant to the development of university and educational cooperation with Sub-Saharan Africa, the promotion of the Spanish language or the existing academic and scientific cooperation and its potential.
“SAAM creates a path for the future, a path that has never been drawn before”
On Tuesday, Béatrice Bellet has represented SAAM as project coordinator and she has presented the project in a panel that has focused on several topics as career opportunities, the links between the business world and the private sector, professional training or the Young Generation as Change Agents program. Béatrice Bellet has said that as a pilot project, “SAAM creates a path for the future, a path that has never been drawn before”. She has made clear that the main intention of the project is building bridges between Europe and Africa. When explaining the methodology, the SAAM coordinator highlighted the importance of the peer-to-peer working system. She stated that SAAM is going to move around 600 people in 4 years and that the goal is that the SAAM network continues working in the future so that the project is sustainable.
After the panel where SAAM has been present, the event has also included the participation of the President of the Women for Africa Foundation, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, who set an interesting conversation about Higher education and the empowerment of African women, with Kah Walla, a politician and entrepreneur from Cameroon. Kah Walla was named in 2007 by the World Bank as one of the seven most influential businesswomen in Africa.
“Africa is in serious trouble and nobody more than Africans know those troubles”, Kah Walla said. The Cameroonian woman commented that in Africa, individuals are extremely worried about their situation as a continent: “It breaks our heart to see our young people leave our countries, we have to offer a minimun to make them stay: water, education and employment”. Those last items are very important for the politician and entrepreneur and somehow connected: “Every year we have 20 million young people looking for a job in Africa but it only has work for 7 million of them. (…) We have to convert the creativity and informal entrepreneurship into formal entrepreneurs and to do so we have to enlarge the access to education”. Ms. Walla bets for a better future for the African continent and, according to her, that future must include the African women and leaders at all leves of the society.
María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, President of the Women for Africa Foundation, also emphasized the role of women and the need of investment in their projects. Ms. Fernández de la Vega explained that whenever she meets Africans, most of them are always willing to come back to their home country: “All the African women who go abroad to learn always come back to their country”. In an optimistic way, the President of the Women for Africa Foundation expressed that by doing 4 or 5 very good new things, we can already change the reality.
The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, was one of the organizing institutions. According to this Ministry, Africa is the youngest continent in the world: “With a population of 1.35 billion inhabitants, of which 60% are under the age of 25”. The mobility of African students has been rising for years since the start of the new century and also in that context, almost 2 million Africans are studying Spanish. For that reason, the academic cooperation between Spain and the African continent must be a matter of interest and what this seminar intends to do as the Ministry stated is identifying “the ways in which Spain an contribute to strengthening the educational offer on the continent and step up exchanges with the aim of forging closer ties and improving mutual understanding between Spain and Africa”.
For the closure, the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and for Ibero-America and the Caribbean, Cristina Gallach, the Director of Africa House, José Segura and the Director of SEPIE, Alfonso Gentil were present.
