The Diplomat
The Cervantes Institute and the Casa África Consortium have renewed their agreement for the joint organization of activities promoting Spanish and disseminating Spanish culture in Africa. The electronic signing of the extension took place on February 24 and 25 by the Director General of Casa África, José Segura Clavell, and the Director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis Manuel García Montero.
The Cervantes Institute and Casa África signed an agreement on March 11, 2022, to establish a framework for collaboration between the two entities for the development of various activities promoting the Spanish language and disseminating Spanish culture in Africa.
The two parties had until March 11, 2026, to extend the agreement. Finally, after both parties expressed their satisfaction with the collaboration developed to date and their desire to update and extend it, the Cervantes Institute and Casa África renewed the agreement for a new four-year period, until March 11, 2030.
According to the extension, for the development of activities carried out between 2026 and 2029, each party will contribute a maximum of €15,000 per year, up to a total of €120,000 between the two. These amounts represent a total increase of €7,000 compared to the €103,000 agreed upon in 2022. The €15,000 allocated for the current fiscal year will be covered by their respective 2026 budgets, for which they have sufficient funding.
As established in the extended agreement, the activities planned by both parties will consist of workshops, forums, meetings, and other formats focused on teaching Spanish and promoting Spanish culture in Africa. These activities will center on various objectives, including teaching Spanish, promoting literary works, fostering the integration of women and increasing the visibility of female creators, engaging with children and young people, promoting reading, fostering exchanges and connections with African literary and artistic creation, training librarians and users in information access, publishing works in Spanish, and organizing cultural and academic initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Cervantes Institute has only one center in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Dakar, Senegal, which opened in December 2021. To date, the Cervantes Institute’s presence in Africa has been concentrated mainly in 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, its presence is much smaller in Sub-Saharan Africa, where, apart from the aforementioned center in Dakar (which replaced the previous Cervantes Classroom established in 2010), it only has one Cervantes Classroom in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
