"Building Global Cooperation - New Alliances with Africa" is designed as a common working program that stimulates and supports collective learning and mutual understanding. It aims at bringing together stakeholders from business, politics and civil society and offers them both an organizational platform as well as a conceptual framework for rethinking mental models. The ambition of the program is to enable global interaction in such a way that benefits everyone. This approach is based on the idea that ethical principles support mutually beneficial interchange despite the plurality of values and perspectives.

"New Alliances with Africa" is an imperative for supporting hopeful initiatives and processes in Africa as well as in the Western parts of the World that contribute to overcoming old stereotypes and creating supportive conditions for true co-operation to take place. It encourages the path taken by Africa to become a valued and authentic partner in international relations and at the same time reminds industrialized nations of necessary investments in the sustainable development of the continent.

Since 2001, the Wittenberg Center for Global Ethics has been pursuing the program "Building Global Cooperation" to contribute to the realization of the 8th Millennium Development Goal: Build a Global Partnership for Development. The program aims at changing paradigms in order to promote consciousness for global issues, mutual dependencies, and worldwide inclusion as well as commitment for individual and collective action. This means questioning the traditional mental models by taking into account the needs and interests of others and thereby finding new "win-win solutions" for common problems. Thus, the idea of Building Global Cooperation is based on both mutually beneficial interchange as well as mutual respect.

Since 2001 a number of workshops and dialogue forums took place at the Wittenberg Center. The Center focuses on internationally trained Young Leaders to discuss the idea of mutually beneficial cooperation, as they have great potential to make a difference if they take responsibility for their own future.