Allow me today to reflect on the purpose and raison d'être of this national institution located in the Canary Islands and why public diplomacy is important.
It happens to me less and less often, but it is not unusual for a Canarian I know to tell me that he or she doesn't know exactly what Casa África is. We are nearing our twentieth anniversary as an institution and it still happens to us, very occasionally. Today, please allow me to reflect and try to tell you from an institutional perspective what Casa África is and what it does, so that you understand what the raison d'être of this institution is and, above all, what it is and what it means to carry out what is known as public diplomacy.
Our country has a peculiar and very interesting model for exercising what could in some ways be described as 'diplomacy without a tie', without the rigidities imposed by classic protocol. Diplomacy aimed primarily at civil society: the Casas Network. Attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation and a key tool of Spanish foreign action, the Casas Network includes, in addition to Casa África (based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), Casa de América (Madrid), Casa Árabe (Madrid and Córdoba), Casa Asia (Barcelona and Madrid), Casa Mediterráneo (Alicante) and the Centro Sefarad-Israel (Madrid).
As we are located in the Canary Islands, we exist in the legal form of a Consortium in which the State Government (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the Government of the Canary Islands and the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria participate, which together set the Casa's line of work, supervise its Strategic Plan, its Annual Action Plans and provide the funds with which to carry out our activity each year.
To put it simply, our work seeks to generate mutual knowledge through the promotion and creation of contact networks between Spaniards and Africans that facilitate collaborative projects. Because mutual benefit is the fundamental and inalienable principle of public diplomacy, the essential approach to building solid and sustainable relations between Spain and Africa.
Everything we do requires and is built from disciplined planning and long and hard-working processes of reflection, in which not only all the members of the institution's team participate, but also undergo public periods of external consultation. This is obviously the work of the management team, under my responsibility, supported by the General Secretariat (Justo Artiles), the Management (Ana María Hernández, accompanied by Lucy Moreau in accounting and Vanessa Herrera in the management secretariat) and the Institutional Area of the Casa (Liv Tralla, accompanied by Carla Mauricio).
We have a three-year Strategic Plan and an annual operational plan, designed to ensure that the institution's activities are appropriately adapted to the present and future needs of its various stakeholders. Furthermore, these strategic and operational plans seek to improve the results obtained, in line with the mission, vision, values and objectives established.
The current Strategic Plan (2025-2027) defines five priority strategic objectives: Governance and geopolitics, Sustainable social and economic development, Climate change and energy transition, Migrations, and Equality and diversity. These themes have an outstanding potential to strengthen bilateral and multilateral relations between Spain and African countries.
Planning is carried out through the Annual Action Plans, the main operational instrument of the Strategic Plan. We have a system of evaluation and continuous improvement, and an IT tool (run by our specialist Airam Padrón) that enables the coordination of programming and the measurement of results in relation to the strategic objectives. Monitoring includes the degree of compliance with the operational plan, the number of beneficiaries, the level of citizen participation and digitisation, and the alignment with priority themes.
The analysis of the performance data and the annual balance sheet are included in the Annual Activity Report, which is published in the institutional websiteThe project will be implemented in conjunction with strategic and operational plans, ensuring the transparency of the process. Among the most recent results, 446 events were held in 2024, with an estimated impact of two million people.
We take detailed care of our institutional image as a whole: from the headquarters building to the dissemination of our mandate, services, activities and results to the different interest groups. We manage our brand and define the design lines of the programmes and their application in external communication. We also perform institutional protocol work to ensure that interactions with governments, diplomats, other institutions and partners are conducted in a formal and strategic manner.
Casa África has an annual budget of two million euros, which is provided by the three institutions that form part of the Consortium. The public budget we manage has hardly changed in the last ten years. For the sake of clarity of information, we have a transparency portal where you can find it all.
For some time now, we have been applying the maxim of making a virtue out of necessity, and we have multiplied our efforts in weaving a wide network of collaborating institutions and organisations with which to carry out a programme that, with only around 400,000 euros a year (we can only dedicate one fifth of the budget to programming), is capable of generating the more than 440 activities that I have just mentioned.
I doubt that there are many institutions in our country with this cost/efficiency ratio, and that is why it is so important, as I said a moment ago, that our work is exhaustively evaluated and measured, as if it were a private company, so that every euro spent achieves the proposed result and is in line with all the objectives approved in the strategic and annual plans. Every year, moreover, we have been evaluated and subjected to stringent controls by the State Comptroller General.
As I said, for us, collaboration is an essential factor in everything we do. From our General Secretariat we establish agreements with organisations that share strategic objectives with Casa África, such as the Biodiversity Foundation, the Anesvad Foundation, the Centre for African Studies, the Federation of African Associations in the Canary Islands, the Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands, the Gambian Ministry of Gender, the Alternativas Foundation and the airline Binter.
We also signed agreements with academic entities for joint actions, such as the Bridge to Africa project of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria or the Africa Campus of the University of La Laguna. In addition, we collaborate with various universities to host students on internships at Casa África.
These agreements reflect our commitment to mutual benefit, efficiency, knowledge sharing and we also contribute to the Africanisation of our partners' agendas. These are not monetary exchanges but in kind, aligning interests and creating a shared agenda.
One way of obtaining new funding to improve our programming in areas in which we were already working has been the participation in European projects of the INTERREG V-A Spain-Portugal MAC Cooperation Programme, which promotes cooperation in the Macaronesian region and West Africa. In the most recent call, Casa África is leading two projects: COMPASS, linked to the field of migration, and AFRICANTECH, for the digital transformation of SMEs in the Canary Islands and our environment in West Africa.
The involvement of Spain's diplomatic representations in Africa and the African embassies in Spain in our day-to-day work is also a fundamental pillar for us. The African ambassadors in our country are regular collaborators, and once a year, around Africa Day, we sit down with them in the so-called Diplomatic Council, where we share our work plans with them and actively listen to them in order to increase and improve our collaboration. Everything we do, in fact, is collaboration.
In a few days we start with the Africa Vive Festival, with which we celebrate International Africa Day on 25 May. Fashion, gastronomy, conferences, cinema, dance, storytelling... I recommend you to consult the programme and participate in our activities. And I hope that after reading this article you have been able to learn how all these activities are thought out and planned, with the utmost respect for public money and always with our goal in mind: to get to know each other, Spaniards and Africans, more and better. As our motto says, in short, to bring Africa and Spain closer together.