Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Abidjan (Agenzia Fides) – Form an elite African people so they can take on important leadership roles in the public and private sector, according to the Church’s social doctrine. This is the objective behind the School of Political and Moral Studies of Western Africa (Ecole des sciences morales et politiques d’Afrique de l’Ouest), which was recently inaugurated in Abdijan.
The institute, created according to the model of the prestigious Institut d’études politiques of Paris, has been promoted by the Jesuits’ Centre de Recharche et d’Action pour la Paix (CERAP). The School offers courses lasting two years on Human Rights, conflict resolution, and the culture of peace, in good government, economic ethic, and sustained development. For the first year, the school is allowing a capacity of 32 students from 8 African nations, with the goal of being able to offer an education to 75 students by 2010.
The school’s spirit in summed up in the document ““Bonne Gouvernance,” whose objective is to make Africans aware of their role and how they can “work in any part of the world, without having a complex that they went to school in Africa.” In order to do this, however, the document explains that “Africa should open itself to the other cultural values, without losing its roots. It is called to journey towards universality and multiculturality. This is not possible unless it is through the education that it will provide for its own people, which should be reflected in the capacity to adapt, in leadership skills, the capacity to discern, decision-making, and the willingness to act in a spirit of upright governing, in political, economic, and social areas.”
CERAP is the offspring of an institute founded in 1962, from which it took the reigns in 2002. CERAP is a public university divided into 4 departments: professional formation service for the youth; a documentation center (library and internet access); the university itself with a school for moral and political formation and a group of investigators; an editorial house that publishes works of a pedagogical, scientific, and cultural nature, and the monthly magazine Débats – Courrier d’Afrique de l’Ouest, whose last number is dedicated to the multiple presence of Christianity in Western Africa. (LM) (Agenzia Fides 7/10/2008)
