AECI–OCPA Seminar on Culture, Development and International Co-operation

Las Palmas, Spain, 17 – 21 December 2007

The seminar was organized by the Spanish Agency for International Co-operation (AECI) and the Observatory of Cultural Policies in Africa in the framework of ACERCA (Programa de Capacitación de la AECI para el desarrollo en el sector cultural) in co-operation with Casa África in Las Palmas (Gran Canaria, Spain) from 17 to 21 December 2007 with the participation of 24 cultural administrators and operators from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo et Ecuatorial Guinea.

The seminar was aimed to contribute to the development of the national capacities of the participating countries in the field of designing, managing and evaluating cultural policies and programmes and projects, as well as of integrating the cultural dimensions in development strategies. It was also meant to facilitate the development of co-operation networks around the projects proposed by the participating countries.

The programme included lectures followed by an exchange of views as well as workshops for discussing the projects presented by the participants.

The courses were held by six speakers: Ms Araceli Pereda Alonso (ACERCA, AECI), and Mr. Frédéric Jacquemin (Fondation Marcel Hicter), Yacouba Konate (Université d'Abidjan), Máté Kovács (OCPA), Lupwishi Mbuyamba (OCPA) et David Roselló (Nexe cultural SL, Barcelona).

The Seminar is the fourth in the series of training sessions organized by OCPA and its various partners. In fact two sessions were held in Nairobi in 2005 in co-operation with UNESCO, Cultural Engineering and the competent Kenyan authorities, a third one with AECI/ACERCA in Madrid in 2006. It is foreseen that three others of them will be organized, again in partnership with AECI/ACERCA in 2008 respectively in Central and Southern Africa as well as in the Indian Ocean sub-region.

The Final Report of the Seminar is available in French only.