BUJUMBURA October 16th (ABP) – The Think Tank Center For Development and Enterprises (CDE-Great Lakes), has organized since Monday, October 12, 2020 in Bujumbura, the French-speaking symposium 2020 which brings together intellectuals from the Great Lakes region and takes place around local and international facilitators.
In an interview with the press, the executive director of CDE-Great Lakes, Mr. Aimable Manirakiza, said that this symposium is one of the activities planned in the program called freedom week 2020 which is an education program intended to promote ideas for freedom to a large audience made up of students, civil society actors, media professionals, national elected officials, women leaders and other stakeholders in various sectors of regional life (Grand lakes). The French-speaking symposium has a mission to promote classical liberal ideas through the texts of liberal thinkers who try to share with those different groups the miracles linked to classical liberal ideas, he added. Mr. Manirakiza said that the participants in that symposium, who number 100 people including 30 who participated physically and others who participate remotely via the Zoom application, are from Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
According to him, the facilitators at this conference are of two kinds, notably international ones, namely Professor Hicham El Moussaoui who comes from Morocco but also Professor Emmanuel Patrick Mardini from Lebanon. There are also local facilitators including the professor of the University of Burundi Dr. Siméon Barumwete, the professor Léonidas Ndayizeye and many others who will facilitate discussions, exchanges and learning on the fundamental resources of liberalism, he continued to say. As for the expectations regarding that event, Mr. Manirakiza also hoped that at the end of the conference, the participants will have had sine qua non knowledge which will allow them to get an idea on the sources of classical liberalism in order to promote it within their community. “We also hope that by the end of this conference we will have trained communicators who will communicate liberal ideas in their respective fields,” he insisted.