Bern, Switzerland [CD-EUD]. Reach Italia is a private non-profit organization founded and governed by a majority of lay members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It has been operating since 1988 for distance support in favor of children living in the poorest parts of the world and it carries out projects of international cooperation.
In 2012 Reach Italy has been involved in several international cooperation projects of great importance.
"Eat? me too!"
The project "Eat? Me too!" will support the need and provide a daily meal, nutritious and complete, to about 7 thousand children attending schools supported by Reach Italia in Congo, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
The total number of children benefitting from this project is at least 6,400, including 17 elementary schools, a school facility and an orphanage. This is a major project that will provide over 1,000,000 meals to children during the school year. The food used to feed the children in this project are: rice, oil, beans and milk.
Carlo Schino, President of Reach Italia, visitingBurkina Faso
About 40 tons of rice a year, 32,000 liters of oil, 20 tons of beans and 3 tons of milk are prepared daily and made available to children through school-meal service. This project also creates an important source of employment for staff in charge of the cooking. The local staff gives children a strong sense of belonging to their roots and hope for the future.
"Recovery of highly degraded lands"
The Sahel region, which literally means "edge of the desert", is the strip of land bordering south of the Sahara desert. Many countries are crossed by the Sahel: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania. This vast area is characterized by a severe land degradation phenomenon. The advance of desertification is caused by the strong climatic variability and strong pressure on the land. Desertification gives rise to a drastic decrease in the fertility of the soil thereby negatively impacting agriculture.
The effects of this degradation is the large and extremely bare areas, where agricultural and pastoral activities are impossible. The degradation of these ecosystems negatively affects the lives of the local people.
The restoration of these degraded ecosystems is important to improve the lifestyles of the poor families that are highly dependent on these resources. It is also important to safeguard the biological diversity and natural resources.
Since the early 1980s, many, especially NGOs, are investing in this "Sahel" part of Burkina Faso, using technology to recover and restore large degraded areas. We are, thus, talking about conservation techniques, restoring soil and water.
And it is in this context that the "Vallerani system", named after its inventor, has been introduced in Burkina Faso since 1997. It is a mechanized and multifunctional technology, used for the treatment of the soil surface. Reach Italia Onlus has been using this method for several years. More than 4 thousand hectares of land have been recovered, making it fertile again.
Projects realized by Reach Italia Onlus require a financial commitment of at least € 200,000 a year. This is collected through public and private funding. The European Union funded a project in 2007, that was the recovery-project of lands made by our association. The European Union has also prepared a technical study on the effectiveness of the work done by Reach Italia.
Among the most important project sponsors implemented by Reach Italia are the Lombardy Region, the Municipality of Milan, the Cariplo Foundation and the Human Life Foundation.
The 8x1000 religion-tax funds of the Italian Adventist Church Union and the Waldensian Church has helped to finance part of these projects.
The projects of Reach Italia have no discriminatory connotation in terms of political, religious, ethnic or social membership. Reach Italia is also pleased to support the work of ADRA in some areas where it is very limited financially. Especially Congo and Niger are countries where ADRA Congo and ADRA Niger receive financial, technical and personnel support by Reach Italia.
by CD-EUD; pictures: Reach Italia
