Rome is preparing to host an Italy-Africa summit on January 28-29. 50 delegations from African countries are expected in the Italian capital.
European leaders and representatives of international organizations will also participate in the summit.
With this conference, the Italian government wants to present its new strategic plan which aims to reassess the country’s approach towards the African continent.
This is one of the priorities of Giorgia Meloni’s government, which should make it a central point of the G7 which she will chair next June.
Italy is struggling to establish itself as a regulatory power in the Mediterranean, particularly with regard to migrant arrivals.
One of the objectives of the new government plan will be to tackle the root economic causes that generate migratory flows from Africa to Europe, with a large number of arrivals in Italy.
However, the ambitions of this plan remain modest, with 3 million euros allocated to it annually over four years.
Its true content will not be known immediately, since the government has announced that it will be built from the summit taking place in Rome this weekend.
On Euronews, the secretary general of AVSI Foundation (NGO for cooperation and development) Giampaolo Silvestri says he hopes that Italy adopts a “bottom-up approach“, that is to say taking into account the needs of the different actors, rather than imposing things from above.