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Honourable Secretaries of State
Honourable Mayor of Lisbon
Honourable President of the City of Lisbon Foundation
Honourable President of the Group of Custodians
Honourable President of the Parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs and Portuguese Communities
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I was very pleased to accept the invitation to attend this formal session of the opening of the academic year of the University College for Cooperation - Nuno Krus Abecasis.

This is an institution that honours the memory of its founder, contributing willingness to develop an active interpretation of its determining spirit.

The President of the City of Lisbon Foundation has just provided an interesting summary of the activities of the Foundation and of this College. He has shown us the routes they dare to explore, the seeds they have sown, and the fruits that have emerged and grown following that work.

Many are the works that, in spite of the vision and good will of their founders, are left to wilt and extinguish in the absence of the impulse of those who launched them. This is not the case with the City of Lisbon Foundation or, in particular, with the University College for Cooperation, institutions that well show the possibility to maintain a course, inherit a spirit to act and promote the objectives that stimulated its constitution and were entrusted to their followers.

It is an ambitious plan which dreamed of a link between peoples, geographically distant, but which have in common that essential heritage which is their language, an incalculable value which allows them to communicate and transmit learning, culture and experience.

But this is a link which is only indelible if we know how to cherish and develop it.
The Portuguese language is today a wealth common to eight sovereign States, which recognize in it one of the main pillars of their identity and independence.

It is through this language that a diversified set of nations and cultures assert themselves. Some older, others more recent, but all of them expressing in Portuguese their specific mode of feeling and being in the world.

It is thus necessary to nurture this heritage, stimulating and broadening the teaching of Portuguese, through meaningful cooperation activities, both at State levels, and through foundations, enterprises and civic associations.

The language we have in common must not be considered only as a historical inheritance, of which we are very proud and which must undoubtedly be internationally asserted.

It is equally necessary that, within the civil society and the peoples in general, there is a consciousness of the real advantages of the existence of such a vast set of peoples and countries where Portuguese is the official language.

We can all benefit from the intensification and diversification of the contacts within the community of Portuguese language speakers.

However, neither projects nor consistent results will exist, unless there is sufficient promotion for the qualification of people, so that sufficiently enabled human resources are available to create, within the users of Portuguese language, a real space for commercial, cultural and scientific trading.

This is the mission assumed by this College, in its widest and more demanding angle, which is the education of youths who are candidates to the support programmes they have available and who have all the conditions to benefit from them.

It is amply demonstrated today that education, and particularly higher education, has a more than compensatory payback than the investment it requires. The effort, the work and the resources which are implied in obtaining an academic degree, are later a permanent value, not only for those who achieved it, but also for the society which receives the advantages of the respective work and skills.

For this reason, to provide support for youths who originate from Portuguese speaking countries in order to continue their studies in our country in comfort and with total social inclusion, is an active form of durable cooperation, that alone is capable to create links which remain long beyond the starting moment.

The role performed by the College of Cooperation, throughout its 18 years, providing many youths with an important opportunity to strengthen their training and foster their ambitions, was visionary and must constitute not just an example to be followed, but also to be enlarged to other fields of our cooperation within the areas where Portuguese language is spoken.

The strengthening of the links of cooperation in the educational and cultural fields, between the Portuguese language countries, and the capacity to involve other performers in this effort, by encouraging the creation of public-private partnerships will, I am certain, be an increasingly decisive step in the procedure of the consolidation of CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) itself.

I would also wish to highlight, regarding the College of Cooperation and how it interacts with civil society that the understanding between peoples is primarily based on the relations that people and enterprises are able to establish amongst themselves.

I know that students with scholarships travel in the country, visit enterprises and contact with economic and social realities, beyond the universities where they chose to study.

This is also a training dimension.

The use of a common language must be a tool that eases other apprenticeships, culture, way of life, working ethics and production, that is, it must awaken an interest in mutual acquaintance, which will provide good results when joint working is required.

It is extremely relevant that the College of Cooperation results from an aggregate of enterprises that joined together to substantiate the dream of many young Africans that arrive here to learn and to contact with the Portuguese entrepreneurial background.

These companies show well enough that they are conscious of the need to sow in order to reap, and that there is no safer way than that which anticipates reality, by preparing the steps of the future.

And what is better for the purpose shown here than the provision of support for the youths who dare, that fight for the development of their countries through greater skills and knowledge?

All who receive their diplomas today are to be congratulated.

This is only a stage, but crucial for your future. That diploma is accompanied by the increased responsibility to maintain and develop the links you have created here, projecting in your countries the dimension and the value that, through the College of Cooperation, you were able to achieve.

I also congratulate the sponsoring enterprises which, throughout the years, have maintained the confidence that it is always possible to do better, to act instead of asking, to risk a compromise and await its results.

Finally, my warm applause to the City of Lisbon Foundation and to those responsible for the College of Cooperation, and my wishes that your exertion and dynamic and equitable spirit may be, increasingly, a case of success in the field of cooperation and in the training of Portuguese language youths. We will all be winners.