Italian

General aim: promote public opinion and institutions’ care about the achievement of the 8th Millennium Development Goal (to Develop a Global Partnership for Development); improve the visibility and the effectiveness of NGOs’ work about development and about global inequality; contribute in the improvement of quality and effectiveness of the cooperation interventions realized by itlalian NGOs.

Specific target: promote and enhance Italian NGOs’ experiences in order to improve their effectiveness, visibility and coordination as well as to make Italian population closer to international solidarity’s issues.

It is online the “cooperation archive”, the digital database of Italian non-governmental cooperation projects and of development education.

The idea of the database comes from the demand of a common space for analysis and for confrontation about the different experiences. This database wants to adequately promote Italian NGOs’ activities and projects.

In this period of economic and geopolitic changes the database offers the basis for the analysis of past successes and errors. In this way it is possible to create, together with Italian population, a new role for future cooperation and international solidarity:

To create a virtual space of meeting and of dialogue for present and future operators in cooperation; to emphasize the great legacy of Italian cooperation experiences; to facilitate the studies by teachers, students or experts; to let people know “who, what, where and how” does Italian cooperation work; to create an exchange network about the best practices and to create new collaborations.

Through this project the goal is to re-launch non-governmental Italian cooperation, reinforcing NGOs and making people aware about the importance of international solidarity. In particular the project wants to systematize and to compare the past experiences of each NGO, making them at the same time more visible and effective. This demand to collect, catalogue and make available for those who are interested in, all the materials of Italian NGOs, comes from two needs (which are common to all associations which work in the international cooperation): to make visible for the civil society what has been realized in the developing countries and to stimulate a real change in north citizens’ lifestyles, in order to modify in a positive direction the inequalities between north and south in the world.

On this basis the project wants to promote the knowledge and the information about north-south imbalances and at the same time a coordination among associations which work in the international cooperation field.

The database is a project built up by COCIS, realized with the contribution of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with 16 NGOs: ACS, ARCS, AGSS, CESTAS, CIC, CIES, CISS, COSPE, CRIC, DI.SVI., ICEI, MAIS, N:EA, PEACE GAMES, RC, RE.TE

What has already been done:

• - digital database of non-governmental Italian cooperation (projects, materials produced during these projects and publications) from 1997 until now

• - communication and promotion of this computer archive and of local events

• - 3 local fairs in north, centre and south of Italy characterized by chances of training and of awareness

• - workshop for students, NGOs and local authorities’ representatives

• - public debate about Italian non-governmental cooperation

• - art event

• - short film about the perception of non-governmental Italian cooperation, with interviews to local people, in order to analyze how are cooperation and NGOs perceived by the “laymen”

• a comic about the history of Italian non-governmental cooperation

Future steps:

Constant updating and reinforcement of the coordination among NGOs

How to contribute

It is possible to support our awareness local activities, with a bank transfer, reason for payment: “Progetti ACS Italia” on:

Bank account, c/o Banca Popolare Etica IBAN: IT77W0501812101000000100007

Postal current account IBAN: IT39J0760112100000012566352

Beneficiary: Associazione di Cooperazione e Solidarietà – Via Bettella 2 ter – 35133 Padova

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