EQUAL COOPERATION

The Mediterranean region, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa have now become a deeply-interconnected area, a natural interlocutor for Italy and for Europe.

The region is scarred by several crisis hotspots and is the starting point of the massive migration flows that have polarized – and captured the attention of – the public opinion and governments alike.
However, the potential of this region is enormous, owing to the wealth of energy and natural resources that it is replete with.

New opportunities of intra-regional and Euro-Med-African cooperation are now being created, particularly with the doubling of the Suez Canal, with the new Silk Road that China has been working on in order to place itself at the very center of international trade routes, and with the development of new energy, infrastructure and IT networks.

This is a matter not so much of posing barriers against that region, even though migration flows must be regulated and monitored, as of establishing together a new model for equitable and sustainable development, a model that could gather together public investors and private enterprises on the basis of mutual benefit and respect.

This is the challenge to which Italy and Europe are to respond, and to which CIPMO wants to give its contribution by means of in-depth studies, research, and of the identification of new, necessary and/or possible policies.