This first 2017 North-South Centre (NSC) of the Council of Europe (CoE) newsletter focuses on its activities as well as on its beneficiaries. I am very confident that we will continue to contribute to fulfil the mission that we have been entrusted to our founding fathers since its inception more than 27 years ago.

You will find in each activity – from global education (we develop in close partnership with the EU) to migration; from empowerment of women to the capacity building of youth - our distinctive bottom up approach, starting in civil society, but not forgetting other stakeholders like local and regional authorities, parliaments and governments, in order to achieve tangible results and meet the needs of our beneficiaries, ensuring them a strong sense of ownership of the whole process. You can consult the programme of our activities in our website.

In 2017, the NSC will have less activities but better focussed and with greater impact on the ground; we will continue our efforts to align better with the key priorities of the Mother House - the Council of Europe – and the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 UN agenda; we will strive for a better geographical balance in terms of stakeholders involved in our projects, as well as to keep the equilibrium of the gender participation and to diversify our partners and networking. And of course we will continue to give to our activities a multilateral nature, putting stakeholders of the North and the South together to find common ground and project common perspectives in a fruitful dialogue, leading to a better understanding of each other cultures and views.

The award of the North-South Prize of the CoE to the mayor of the city of Lampedusa, Ms. Giusi Nicolini, for her remarkable work in the field of migration, and to Ms Mbarka Brahmi, for her relevance in the democratic transition in Tunisia, together with the Lisbon Forum, this year dedicated to Interconnecting People, are the flagships of the NSC and they were precisely meant to honour mankind, both from the North and the South of our planet.

But this is not enough. We will spread our activities throughout the year ensuring proper management and quality; we will be more transparent to facilitate proper monitoring; we will reinforce our communication skills, giving more visibility to the NSC activities; and we will try to improve the good ratio between expenditure in activities (65% of the total budget in 2016) and salaries and running costs.

Now is also the time to get our membership more interested in their NSC, by being more involved in its activities, advocating its work and raising-awareness about it.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank the enriching contributions to this newsletter of the Deputy Secretary General of the CoE, Ms Gabriella Battaini-Dragoni, the Ambassador of Cyprus, Ms Theodora Constantinidou, representing the current Cypriot Chairmanship of the Committee of the Ministers of the CoE, the Ambassador of Malta, Mr. Joseph Filletti, on behalf of the current Presidency of the EU, and Ms Ayo Wallace, the Secretary General of the African Diaspora Youth Network in Europe.

As time goes by the NSC will adapt to the new challenges that are already before us, meeting and contributing to address them within the CoE family, having in mind its principles and values, its conventions and standards, its soft power tools and mechanisms and also the sustainable development goals of the 2030 UN Global agenda.

The dialogue between the North and the South has not gone away, on the contrary, the globalization process demands it and the NSC, in a very humble attitude, tries to contribute to reinforce its interdependence, to create new partnerships and to foster solidarity.