Naomi's dream

Naomi, a brilliant Kenyan student, has achieved excellent results at school and her teachers push her to enroll in university. Since her father had studied in Italy, due to elective affinities, she also chooses the Bel Paese.

She enrolls on the pre-enrollment portal Universitaly, her qualifications are considered suitable, then at the university - again everything goes well - she attends the Italian course online and passes the language exam. Everything goes well until she encounters Italian bureaucracy. For the scholarship and the canteen they require documents that do not exist or are difficult to find in her country (such as the ISEE...). To enroll she is therefore forced to pay the maximum fee, she cannot access any benefits while her family has a mere subsistence income (a situation that makes it prohibitive for her to continue her studies in Italy). Then comes the request for a residence permit: an endless process of documents that need to be translated into Italian that discourages even the most daring – even researchers hired by the Polytechnic University of Turin have problems with permits. In a country that needs young people, with a significant birth rate, it would be necessary to incentivize those who choose Italy to study (they call it regular quality migration) and instead the administrations seem to be going in the opposite direction. In Europe, 48 million new workers are needed to compensate for the decrease in the working-age population (this year in Italy less than 400 thousand children were born, in the 1950s one million were born).

Europe will lose 1.6 million people of working age every year while in Africa the working-age population will double from 700 million to 1.5 billion in 30 years. According to researcher Natalia Bhattacharjee: «The implications are immense […]. These trends in fertility rates will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will require the reorganization of societies".

Thus, on an autumn night, a student learns that with Italian bureaucracy the best one can expect is to avoid the worst. She understands that it is better not to mix her dreams with those who have never realized one of their own and that - in the end - the world beyond the peninsula is full of people who can't wait to study and want to live.


Fabrizio Floris
NP November 2024