What we do
Piccoli progetti, sostenibili e richiesti direttamente dal territorio
In 2014 we invested 2 million 900 thousand euros in 145 solidarity projects in five continents, with a particular focus on Africa and Latin America.
Over a million people have benefited form our development projects, of which over a half are children, teenagers and students.
The projects were launched on the basis of requests coming from local communities and were directed mainly to these areas:
- Health
- Education
- Human rights promotion
- Access to water.
Attention to sustainable development
These are mainly small projects with an economic investment which in most cases remains below the €10,000 threshold. These projects are designed to meet specific needs. Often, however, even amounts as small as these prove instrumental in resolving extreme poverty and in initiating fruitful development chains.
Development projects selection criteria
Every year we receive about 350 requests to activate a solidarity project. We manage to initiate over a third of these by choosing them carefully by means of certain criteria which experience has shown to be especially effective:
- Reaching the poorest of the poor. This does not only entail giving preference to the poorest countries, it also entails finding the most deprived areas in a country and the most marginalised people: children rather than adults, women rather than men, the indigenous population rather than the rest of the population.
- Sponsor only those projects that have been demanded by the beneficiaries themselves. Demand their aid in the realisation and recovery of the resources. Avoid imposing a model of development from above. Every national group has, within itself, the capacity to lift itself out of poverty, and who better than the beneficiaries themselves know their own needs and limits?
- Prefer small and sustainable projects. Avoid projects that are aloof and distant from the level of development and sensibility of the people involved. Search for the sustainability of the projects. A small local school is better that an elaborate college, a small clinic is to be preferred to a hospital, a small factory or workshop to a firm with sophisticated and hard to obtain equipment.
- Prefer development projects to assistance projects. It is of fundamental importance to eliminate the root causes of poverty by giving people the capacity to walk on their own feet. However, in cases of emergency, where immediate help must be provided, assistance is in any case guaranteed. This occurs during wars, plagues or natural disasters.
- Act on the same areas with multiple projects. This allows us to eliminate more than one cause of poverty and thus to promote the overall development of a community. These multiple and integrated projects are the safest ones as well because they are based on established friendships with these responsible for the projects and on a deeper knowledge of the nature of the problems to be solved.
