15-01-2026 | di COOPI

Mourning for Gildo Baraldi

On 13 January, Gildo Baraldi passed away. He was one of the “fathers” of international cooperation in Italy.

Active in the development cooperation sector since the early 1970s, he collaborated actively with Father Barbieri (COOPI’s founder) to give the sector a recognised institutional structure. In this capacity, he participated in various Italian technical committees and commissions for the drafting of Law 49 of 1985 and subsequently Law 125/2014. Alongside this “institutional” role, he actively participated in dozens of development cooperation projects, with planning, management, monitoring and evaluation missions in many countries in the southern hemisphere.

In recent years, he was Director General of the Interregional Observatory on Development Cooperation (OICS), the coordinating body of the Italian regions and autonomous provinces for decentralised development cooperation.

Many of us at COOPI knew him personally and now bid him farewell with deep affection.