History
That’s how it began, that’s how it continued.
On the 6th of March 1999, the founding meeting of ARSIMI took place in Zurich, Switzerland. For more than 25 years, we have been committed to the education of Albanian-speaking people, whether they live in Albania, in Kosovo, North Macedonia, or Switzerland.
From the membership fees and generous donations, we have distributed nearly 180,000 Swiss Francs for 85 projects from 1999 to 2023. The contributions varied significantly, ranging from 200 to 10,000 Swiss Francs. They were distributed with 47% of the total going to Albania, 26% to Kosovo, 16% to the Albanian-speaking areas of North Macedonia, and 11% to Switzerland (1999-2018). The annual project contributions have since remained in approximately the same range.
Three Swiss individuals, Hansueli Geiger, Mahir Mustafa, and Marise Lendorff, visited the private Albanian University of Tetova in 1998. They were impressed and concerned by the conditions under which teaching was conducted there and took the initiative to establish a circle of friends of the University of Tetova in Switzerland. The first attempt to establish it failed due to unforeseen difficulties that arose during the escalating conflict in Kosovo and Tetova.
We then changed the statutes and expanded the scope and objectives: Newly, the entire Albanian-speaking region and all levels of education from kindergarten to university were to be considered.
From the beginning, the ARSIMI board was heavily teacher-dominated. The PH Zurich (Zurich University of Teacher Education) was represented by several lecturers, in addition to teachers from the University of Tetova, the University of Zurich, and the ETH Zurich (Federal Institute of Technology Zurich). Basil Schader and Lolita Poda were the first co-chairs.
The PH Zurich has been strongly committed to the field of Albanian teacher training from the start and, together with ARSIMI, has supported several projects in Switzerland and Kosovo. The SDC project “Kosovision” received multi-year, sustainable support, as did the specialist library of the Albanian University of Arts in Tirana. Several primary schools in Northern Albania were also regularly supported with their renovation and equipment problems. For the Kosovision follow-up project VisCoKos, ARSIMI has nominally taken over the function as the sponsoring association since 2020.
But the spectrum also included more specialised projects, as a look at the list of projects shows. For example, in 2005 in Tirana, Roma children were taken off the streets through music lessons, in 2010 we financed a sub-project of the PH Northwestern Switzerland at the University of Shkodra, and in 2011 the writer Arif Demolli was supported on his reading tour through Switzerland.
The largest project, with 10,000 Swiss Francs, came about in 2017 thanks to a bequest: A scientific course for special education teachers at the new official University of Tetova could be financed thanks to the donor Renate Guillelmon, who had worked for many years on our board. Here too, a follow-up project is planned (owing to sustainability).
A special highlight in our association’s history was the trip through Albania in the autumn of 2001, which nearly failed due to the grounding of Swissair. A second trip in September 2019 through Northern Albania, Kosovo, and North(west) Macedonia, connected with visits to project partners, became an unforgettable experience for all participants.
Each year, the Annual General Meetings provids an opportunity to present special projects of partner institutions and individuals. Their presentations are always an enriching insight into related fields of work.Since the beginning, the board has been composed of committed individuals who are connected in some way, through origin, professional activity, or acquaintances, with the Albanian areas of the Western Balkans. Our project partners usually have a responsible contact person on the board, responsible for monitoring. In this way, risks and misdevelopments can be identified and corrected at an early stage. So far, this simple method has prevented financial losses.