At the summit opening, Pope Francis greeted a delegation of children, some of them arrived in Italy with the humanitarian corridors.
After the pontiff's speech, the meeting was divided into several panels that discussed issues related to childhood. The President of the Community of Sant'Egidio, Marco Impagliazzo, and the coordinator of the DREAM programme in Mozambique, Noorjehan Abdul Majid, participated.
The children met by Pope Francis at the International Summit on Children ‘’Love them and protect them‘’ were excited and confident. They handed the pontiff a letter and some drawings. Some of these children arrived in Italy through the humanitarian corridors promoted by the Community. Manar is a 12-year-old Syrian girl who, after fleeing the war and living in a refugee camp in Lebanon, arrived in Italy in 2020 with her mother and siblings. She started attending school for the first time. Fithwait, of Eritrean origin, is 11 years old and comes from Ethiopia. In 2020, thanks to the humanitarian corridors, she and her mother could be reunited with her father, who had arrived in Europe years earlier after a journey across the Sahara and the Mediterranean.
Pope Francis spoke of the ‘difficult peripheries, where little ones are not infrequently vulnerable and suffer from problems that we cannot underestimate’. Peripheries marked by ‘poverty, war, lack of schooling, injustice and exploitation’. The peripheries are also those of rich countries, since ‘the world is not immune from injustice’.
President Marco Impagliazzo launched an appeal so that ‘the unitive tension can be rediscovered in the world to guarantee all the children of the human family, the right to education’. Investing in schools is the only way to overcome the evils of the world, today represented above all by war. To heal the world from injustice, it is necessary to be present in the peripheries: ‘We have an idea, to fill the cities and the peripheries with Schools of Peace, schools where children learn to read and write and where they are also taught about peace, the importance of peace and living together’. He then concluded: ‘One hour of lessons changes lives. A thousand hours of lessons can change the world'.
Dr. Abdul Majid Noorjehan reported on the DREAM programme's efforts to combat child mortality. In particular, ‘DREAM started the Vertical Transmission Prevention Programme, aimed at reducing HIV mother-to-child infection, while focusing on quality and excellence of services. Thanks to this programme, today we have had more than 150,000 healthy babies born across the continent to HIV-positive mothers’. In addition, DREAM has contributed with its centres to fight child malnutrition. Thanks to the BRAVO programme, more than 5 million previously invisible African children have been registered at the registry office. ‘Children have the right to a life of dignity, with universal access to health care, food security and a healthy environment. A collective effort is needed to keep moving forward. Every contribution, no matter how small, can make a difference’.
