What?

What is the opinion of those living in the Southern Hemisphere on the 8 Millennium Development Goals? This project arose from this simple but not trivial question. The interpretation and analysis of the development and the MDGs rarely takes into account the opinion of those in the South. We went in search of the records, interpretations and visions of artists, professionals and academics from the African continent. This project sees Africa not merely as a source of emigrational proceedings but as an active place and as a producer of research, culture and information.

How?

The European project, directed by the Municipality of Vittoria in Italy, in partnership with our association and with another two municipalities in Malta and Hungary, has seen the active and direct participation of various players from the artistic and African academic fields: the university of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the university of Botswana, the association Afrique in visu del Mali, Planète Jeunes from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and the Marê Caela a Capo Verde association.

The project was organised into three different phases: research and publication, awareness and lastly socio-cultural planning.

The research focused on the gathering and organisation of material and experiences related to MDGs from the point of view of those in the southern hemisphere, and, in particular of south-Saharan Africa. All of the African corporations involved thus analysed and sent a series of documents and testimonies relating to the 8 Objectives, gathering comic strips, academic research, institutional papers, photographic reports, videos and specialists reports on the issues of the project. From all of these documents, various materials were produced for educational development such as an interactive website, as well as two publications on the MDGs and an educational toolkit for schools, in which the southern hemisphere presents its real opinion on development.

All these documents were the basis for a detailed and widespread awareness-raising campaign which included training seminars for those in charge of the cities, districts and provinces involved, seminars for local school teachers, workshops in secondary schools in Sicily, Sardinia, Hungary and Malta. Initiatives, like cultural and artistic concerts and shows, aimed at increasing the “public awareness” of issues addressed by the project.

In addition, the project provided a socio-cultural planning phase that organised intense training sessions on development education, fundraising policies, decentralised cooperation, as well as meetings in Brussels focusing on decentralized cooperation addressed to local authorities, organization of a set of micro-activities to increase local awareness and seminars for exchange between the Northern and Southern hemispheres