At the beginning of 2005, the Fondazione Italcementi Carlo Pesenti started raising funds to build a Vocational Training School in Sri Lanka for the people struck by the tsunami in December 2004.The funds raised through this initiative, which is still continuing today, amount to 1,552,814 euro (as at December 2005) and were mainly donated by companies belonging to Italcementi Group and their employees.
The school will be handed over to the Religious Order of the Salesian Fathers, which has been working in Sri Lanka for more than forty years and is dedicated to the victims of the tsunami and to young people at risk due to their involvement or potential involvement in the civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels, or because they are victims of sexual abuse. About fifty Salesian fathers are working in Sri Lanka, mostly Sinhalese in nationality, managing ten different centres in the country and very highly thought of by the local government with whom they have always been on good terms. The school - which is to host about 300 students, 200 of whom will receive board and lodging on the premises - will provide vocational education of excellence in the field of building construction. The courses will be aimed at offering occupational skills training to local people to satisfy the predicted demand for infrastructures while taking advantage of Italcementi Group’s expertise in this field.
Subjects taught will be focused on the technical and practical aspects of mechanics, plumbing, carpentry, manufacturing of windows & doors, manufacturing of building materials, and information technology.
The decision to support a venture of this type was supported by the fact that the tsunami in Sri Lanka completely destroyed 68 schools and partially damaged a further 105 causing enormous difficulties for the country’s educational system. A significant proportion of the students of the new school were directly affected by the tsunami.
In its annual report of 2004, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka expressed its wish that the standards of technical institutes should be strengthened and raised in order to foster the very rapid development underway in the industrial and building sectors in the country.
In addition, the need for a Salesian centre with these characteristics, similar to the one that has already been active for a few years in Albania, further supported the idea to set up a school dedicated to the building trade.