Italy hosted Mediterranean leaders in Rome on Sunday at a conference aimed at extending an EU-backed deal with Tunisia to curb the arrival of migrants on European shores.

The summit convened by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni laid the foundations for a fund to finance investment projects and support border controls, with a medium-term aim of better regulating migratory flows.

Opening the conference, Meloni said talks would focus on illegal and legal immigration, refugee support and “the most important … wide cooperation to support development in Africa”.

The day of talks was the “start of a process” that would be followed with a donors’ conference to finance investment projects and support border control, Meloni said, adding that no date had yet been set.

The United Arab Emirates pledged €100 million (US$111 million) to that fund, Meloni said in a press conference following the meeting.

Ahead of the talks, Pope Francis appealed to the leaders to help the scores of people who try to enter Europe each year in search of a better life as they flee poverty and conflict.

“The Mediterranean can no longer be the theatre of death and inhumanity”, the pontiff said during his weekly Angelus prayer.

During the 2022 election campaign that brought her to power, the far-right Meloni vowed to “stop the disembarkation” of migrants in Italy, which the government puts at nearly 80,000 coastal arrivals since January, compared with 33,000 in the same period last year.

But while the government has put obstacles in the path of humanitarian ships rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, it has failed to stop the departures themselves, which mostly originate in Tunisia and Libya.