The Diplomat
The Instituto Cervantes and Casa África have signed a collaboration agreement to promote the Spanish language and disseminate Spanish culture on the African continent.
The agreement was signed at the respective headquarters between March 9 and 11 by the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the director general of Casa África, José Segura Clavell, and its objective, as recently published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), is to “establish the lines of collaboration between the Cervantes Institute and Casa África for the development of different activities on the promotion of Spanish and the dissemination of Spanish culture in Africa”.
The activities that are programmed for the execution of the object of this agreement will consist of conferences, forums, meetings or other formats on the teaching of Spanish and the dissemination of Spanish culture in Africa, and will focus on various objectives, such as the teaching of Spanish, the dissemination of literary creations, the integration of women and the visibility of women creators, the attention to children and young people, the promotion of reading, the promotion of exchanges and bridges with African literary and artistic creation, the training of librarians and users in the access to information, the edition of publications in Spanish and the organization of cultural and academic initiatives in the field of Sub-Saharan Africa.
It also provides for the implementation of a series of specific activities, such as holding the biannual meeting of Hispanists Africa-Spain, the collaboration and celebration of cultural activities related to the Africa Plan of the Instituto Cervantes, the co-publication of the second edition of the report Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa and the promotion of Casa África’s collections.
From the budgetary point of view, the two entities will contribute a total of 103,000 euros during the four years provided for by the agreement: 25,000 in 2022, 30,000 in 2023, 18,000 in 2024 and 30,000 in 2025. Specifically, Casa África will contribute 50,000 euros (10,000 in 2022, 15,000 in 2023, 10,000 in 2024 and 15,000 in 2025) and the Instituto Cervantes will participate with 53,000 euros (15,000 in 2022, 15,000 in 2023, 8,000 in 2024 and 15,000 in 2025).
The Instituto Cervantes inaugurated its first center in Sub-Saharan Africa last December in Dakar (Senegal). To date, the Instituto Cervantes’ presence in Africa has focused mainly on the north of the continent, where it has eleven centers in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, in addition to several (smaller) extensions in Morocco and Algeria. In contrast, the presence is much lower in Sub-Saharan Africa, where, apart from the aforementioned center in Dakar (which replaced the previous Cervantes Classroom established in 2010), it only has a Cervantes Classroom in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), created recently. García Montero announced last November the possible opening of the first Observatory of Spanish in Africa in 2023, specifically in Equatorial Guinea. Sub-Saharan Africa, with more than 1.5 million students, is the third largest region in the world in terms of the number of Spanish language students.
