During the graduation ceremony of the first students of the Sardegna ForMed project, Antonello Cabras, President of the Fondazione di Sardegna, committed to making this project a permanent activity for mobility in the Mediterranean basin. The ForMed project, funded by the Fondazione di Sardegna and managed together with Universities from the UNIMED network, “can no longer be considered an experiment but rather a stable project that the Fondazione di Sardegna wants to make permanent in the years to come”.

ForMed, born thanks to the strong support of Professor Franco Rizzi who was frequently remembered during the conference “Towards a new Mediterranean generation”, has thus created tangible results: two years after its launch, nine students from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco graduated.

The other students currently enrolled at the Universities of Sassari and Cagliari will graduate between September and November 2017.

“We believe in positive influences, in comparisons, in openings and we are confident that the entire territory will benefit from the presence of our students from the southern shore of the Mediterranean. We want ForMed to be the first stage of a journey that will lead to the creation of new international courses.” These were the words of Rector Massimo Carpinelli who, together with the offices in charge, gave a great boost to the success of the project.

The Arab Universities in the ForMed partnership also expressed their enthusiasm for the results of the initiative. The Mohammed V University was represented by Vice-Rector Prof. Ilham Berrada, the University of Algiers 2 by Prof. Souad al-Khelouiati and the University of Tunis by Prof. Ben Aziza.

Though not physically present, Laura Frigenti, Director of the Italian Agency for Cooperation and Development (AICS), sent a message on the structural measures which will be based on the ForMed experience and stating that the results obtained by this project are in line with the “guidelines of Italian cooperation in the field of education and with the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda”. The Italian Deputy Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Mario Giro, also sent his greetings, and announced that, with ForMed, “a new Mediterranean working table was born”.

Lastly, the President of UNIMED, Prof. Wail Benjelloun, defined the Sardinia ForMed project as unique in the Italian and European landscape, a “flagship” for UNIMED’s activities, which not only presents this experience to its associated universities, but also to the offices of the European Commission, with the aim of promoting ForMed as a best practice and of evaluating new possible implementations.