Emanuela del Re, with Women for Africa

Madrid, September 8, 2021. Emanuela del Re, European Union Special Representative for the Sahel, visited our headquarters yesterday to hold an interview with María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, president of Women for Africa, and her team and to explore ways of collaboration.

Ms. del Re expressed her interest in working with women’s organizations and insisted on the importance that the EU attaches to their empowerment, stressing the need to translate this community interest in the implementation of projects and initiatives sustainable over time so that they can contribute to social transformation.

The Special Representative wants to set up a European network of projects for the advancement of women in which organizations from different countries of the Union can work together.

For her part, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega conveyed to Emanuela del Re the special interest that Women for Africa has had since its inception in the Sahel region, given its geostrategic situation and the special problems it has been suffering for years, and of which, she said, the main victims are always women.

However, she insisted, women are also the only ones who can bring cohesion to the Sahel.

The president of the foundation detailed the projects we have set up in the area, from “Women of Mali for Peace”, which offered leadership and mediation training to Malian women, to the seminar recently held together with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, with which we have been working for the last two years on the Women’s Alliance for Peace initiative.

Fernandez de la Vega insisted to Mrs. del Re that Europe, in its relationship with the Sahel and in general with Africa, must think first and foremost in the interests of African citizens and not in their own political interests, in which the Special Representative agreed, and offered her the full support of the Women for Africa Foundation in the important task ahead.