2009

Assistance in the creation of the Amazigh’s House of Catalunya

The context

Amazigh is the name of the origin population in North Africa. The presence of the Amazigh people goes from the Atlantic Ocean to the West of Egypt (in a discontinued way), in a set of territories called Tamazgha. We often know this area as the Maghreb, as this was the name given by the Arab colonization to this Western area of the Arab domains. Its history has suffered Roman conquest, European, Arab, etc, which has caused that today the Tamazgha is a territory fragmented in different States. It is estimated that currently the amazigh population can reach more than twenty million people. Its the Amazigh language has remained until today, when it is beginning to be used also when writing, until now it was only used when speaking.

In Catalonia, it is estimated that 80% of the Maghrebi population has an amazigh origin, which places the amazigh language as the third most spoken in our territory, after the Catalan and Spanish. Because of this reality of migration in Catalonia and the mutual recognition between the two villages, the Catalonian Parliament adopted the resolution 1197/VI on March 6th 2002, to support the identity, language and culture of the amazigh people.

The project

The Amaziga’s House of Catalunya (CAC) was created by a group of Catalan amazighs entities and has the support of the Secretaria per a l’immigració and the Agència Catalana de Cooperació al Desenvolupmanet (ACCD), as well as numerous entities as AVALUEM and which have become a process of accompaniment in the creation of the CAC.

The main target of the CAC is to be a space for the promotion of the culture and language amazigh and also a place of encounter and exchange between amazigh and Catalan citizens. This is why, among the activities planned by the CAC, there is the organizing courses for amazigh language, the creation of a documentation centre, the creation of awareness-raising materials, the organization of exchange stays, orientation and association for the resident amazigs, training on co-development and the promotion of intercultural relations and the establishment of bilateral relations between Catalonia and Tamazgha.

The supported task has been:

• Constitution of the Council of the Amazigh agencies (Imazighn from Catalunya)
• Constitution of the technical secretariat of the project (the management authority of the CAC)
• Make a round of presentations of the initiative key players so they could join
• Develop and edit the information material
• Make dissemination of the program
• Organize a training course on the formulation of development projects