ABSTRACT
The focus of this study is the training of Third World personnel in Italy, with the German experience being presented as a comparative foil. It maintains that there is a great opportunity for Third World students to be two-way intermediaries (between developed and less developed nations) and change agents within their own countries. However, the opportunities are often lost more as a result of lack of infrastructure, back-up, sensitivity and appropriateness in the donor country than failings of the students. Despite its shortcomings Italy is seen as a ‘more appropriate’ model: owing to historical and geographical factors, it can provide appropriate economic and technical models for transfer; at the same time it provides an easier economy into which foreign students can integrate, often informally, with results that are not entirely beneficial; finally, it provides a magnet for a significant Third World brain drain. Italy may thus be resuming its traditional transitional position between North and South and West and East, though Middle Eastern students are in decline, whilst African students are on the increase. In spite of the arguably lesser appropriateness as a transfer-model of the German situation, that country’s more development-oriented programmes furnish Italy with a fitting exemplar.
