Salesian leaders from across Africa met at the Salesian Provincial House in Gottera to rethink how the congregation forms and animates its members amid rapid continental growth; the weeklong gathering, which coincided with Golden Jubilee celebrations marking 50 years of Salesian presence in Ethiopia and Eritrea, produced a six-year strategic plan (2025–2031) and reinforced commitments to vocational training, social services, digital engagement and continental coordination.
The meeting in Addis offers more than internal housekeeping for a religious order; it provides a practical template for institutional resilience that intersects directly with Africa’s sustainability challenges. The Salesians of Don Bosco, a Catholic religious institute with a growing footprint across the continent, reported a network that now exceeds 2,200 professed Salesians and 177 novices across some 210 communities in 42 countries, a scale that makes their formation systems a material factor in regional human capital development and community services.
These personnel numbers, and the pipeline of theological students, brothers in training and aspirants cited by provincial leadership, are not abstractions: they represent educators, vocational trainers, social workers and local managers whose skills and institutional capacity feed into education-to-employment pathways and community resilience.
A core focus emerging from the Addis sessions was the sustainability of formation itself, how to cultivate vocation, technical competence and pastoral leadership without exhausting limited personnel or infrastructure. The Salesians pointed to four continental services as the scaffolding for this work: Salesian formation networks (SAFCAM), DBTECH Africa, a continental TVET network they say links 120 training centers in 34 countries – Salesian Social Services, and a strengthened digital communications platform.
DBTECH’s scale, if fully mobilized, could materially shift skills availability in economies where youth unemployment and underemployment are acute; a network of 120 TVET sites, for instance, can serve as distributed nodes for green skills, small-scale renewable maintenance, agro-processing and circular economy trades that directly link to national sustainability targets.
The leaders framed formation quality as a sustainability problem: poorly formed or unsupported personnel produce high turnover, mission drift and stranded investments in facilities. In response, the six-year plan emphasizes accompaniment and quality assurance, coaching systems, post-novitiate placements and practical training cohorts, designed to convert numerical growth into durable local capacity.
This emphasis matters because in fragile and conflict-affected contexts across West, Central and East Africa, durable local organizations are the most reliable providers of education, health referral linkages and livelihoods support. The Salesians’ reported presence across 15 provinces and four delegations, and the recent restructuring of the Africa-Madagascar region into two larger regions (East-South Africa and Central-West Africa), were presented as governance moves intended to improve coordination and resource allocation at scale.
Viewed through a sustainability lens, the Salesian agenda intersects directly with three measurable objectives continental governments and development partners prioritize: workforce readiness, social inclusion and climate-sensitive livelihoods. The TVET network alone offers a lever to introduce market-relevant, low-carbon trades, solar installation, efficient masonry, sustainable agriculture processing, into curricula.
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The social services arm can scale community-level interventions that build social protection and disaster resilience, while the digital platforms can reduce information asymmetry between training providers and employers, improving job matching and reducing wasted training investments. Addis itself has lately been a hub for continental conversations on financing resilient development, and the timing of the Salesian meeting places the congregation’s internal plans squarely within that broader policy moment.
There are immediate, practical challenges. The numbers reported at the meeting, including 273 theology students, 65 Brothers, 244 in practical training, 432 post-novices, 177 novices and roughly 280 aspirants, show a deep pipeline but also reveal pressure points: formation personnel, reliable infrastructure, and contextualized curricula.
In many African countries, training facilities are chronically underfunded and energy insecure; technical schools lack steady electricity, which constrains green skills training such as solar PV maintenance or refrigeration for cold-chain microenterprises. The Salesians’ acknowledgement of “war, violence, and lack of formation personnel and necessary infrastructures” is therefore not rhetorical: it signals that converting institutional ambition into durable community benefit will demand targeted investment and partnership with governments and donors.
For sustainability actors, the Salesians present an unusual partner: a faith-based network with deep local roots, an existing continental coordination centre in Nairobi, and explicit vocational and social-service portfolios.
Donor conversations that historically silo faith actors from technical education or climate adaptation programs may need recalibrating. Funders seeking community-anchored delivery channels for skills training, micro-enterprise support, or social protection pilots should take note of organizations that already manage hundreds of training placements and community projects.
The real test will be how the Salesians’ six-year plan is operationalized: whether DBTECH’s 120 hubs are upgraded to include green technology modules, whether social services incorporate climate-smart disaster risk reduction, and whether digital platforms close, rather than widen, access gaps for rural youth.
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The meeting closed in a register typical of the congregation, spiritual thanksgiving and calls for accompaniment, but its implications extend into the secular architecture of African sustainability. Institutional growth without quality formation risks producing more institutions that cannot sustain themselves; quality formation linked to vocational relevance and regional coordination can seed durable community assets: trained technicians, resilient schools, and social programmes that persist through economic and environmental shocks.
