The Diplomat
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Instituto Cervantes and Casa África have signed an agreement for the training of up to thirty Spanish teachers in Africa, preferably in Senegal and Ivory Coast. The estimated cost of this activity is just over 71,000 euros.
The agreement with the Casa África Consortium for the organization of a teacher training course for teachers of Spanish as a foreign language in Sub-Saharan Africa was signed on January 26 by the director of the Cabinet of the Secretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, María Salcedo; the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis Manuel García Montero; and the general director of Casa Asia, José Segura Clavell.
The objective of the agreement, published last Monday in the Official State Gazette (BOE), is to agree the conditions of collaboration between the parties for the realization of a training course aimed at up to 30 teachers of Spanish from sub-Saharan countries, preferably from Senegal and Ivory Coast, to be held in the first quarter of 2023.
The course will be aimed at teachers of Spanish as a foreign language who have at least an accredited level of Spanish at level B2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The maximum number of participants will be thirty and the course will be given by the Instituto Cervantes at its Teacher Training Center in Alcalá de Henares and will have a duration of 25 teaching hours, five hours per day, during the five days of a week. Students who participate in the courses and have attended 80% of the classes will receive a certificate issued by the Instituto Cervantes.
The financial participation of the Ministry will be a maximum of 50,000 euros, that of the Instituto Cervantes will be a maximum of 18,000 euros and that of Casa África will be a maximum of 3,300 euros. In no case may these amounts be exceeded. In addition, the Ministry will manage and pay for the travel expenses (round trip) of the Course participants from Dakar and Abidjan to the city of Alcalá de Henares and will be responsible for managing and paying for the medical care insurance in Spain for the students. Likewise, the Embassies will be in charge of managing the visas of those attending the course.
Precisely, the Spanish ambassador in Ivory Coast, Rafael Soriano Ortiz, received last January 30 fifteen Ivorian Spanish teachers who went to the Embassy to collect their visa to participate in this linguistic, pedagogical and cultural refresher course “that will be hosted by the Instituto Cervantes in Alcala de Henares” from “February 23”, as he reported through his official Twitter account.
For its part, Casa África will provide meals for course participants and the Instituto Cervantes will design the academic program of the course, select teachers, carry out the administrative management, make available its Teacher Training Center in Alcalá de Henares and provide accommodation for students. In addition, the Instituto Cervantes, through its center in Dakar and its classroom in Abidjan, and the Ministry, through its Embassies in Senegal and Ivory Coast, will be responsible for disseminating and promoting the course among local educational authorities, universities or training schools in those countries and for selecting the participants.
In March 2022, the Instituto Cervantes and Casa África signed another collaboration agreement to promote the Spanish language and disseminate Spanish culture on the African continent, which included, among its many planned activities, the promotion of Spanish language teaching.
The Instituto Cervantes inaugurated its first center in sub-Saharan Africa in Dakar in December 2021. Apart from this center in Senegal (which replaced the previous Aula Cervantes set up in 2010), the Institute’s presence in this region is limited to the recently created Aula Cervantes in Abidjan (Ivory Coast). Sub-Saharan Africa is, with more than 1.5 million students, the third largest region in the world in terms of the number of Spanish language students. García Montero announced at the end of 2023 the possible opening of the first Observatory of Spanish in Africa in 2023, specifically in Equatorial Guinea.
