Before joining Expertise France, you spent fifteen years with the French Development Agency (AFD). What is less well known is that you have considerable expertise in water and sanitation…

I was previously Deputy Director, Sustainable Development Solutions Department, AFD.

Before that, I was Deputy Director of the Rabat office in Morocco, the largest of AFD’s country offices. I was also responsible for the global water and sanitation sector.

So, my background is in water and sanitation. I did a lot of work in many countries to strengthen basic services, but also in France for the Suez Group. I was involved in some of the major public-private partnerships that were set up and was even responsible for water utilities in the Hauts de Seine department for a while.

Before that, I worked in the same sector but on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) and resources in the Sahel countries with NGOs such as GRET and the Solidarité eau programme.

Expertise that you can put to good use in your new role: Water and
sanitation issues are among the biggest challenges facing the continent.

Water is obviously a resource that needs to be preserved, but it is also a highly social and political issue. You can see this in local communities in Africa, but also in the private sector. That’s why I went into the private sector at one point, because it met a need and allowed me to scale up. The reason I went to AFD was because I felt the need to strengthen the institutional framework in countries and then to strengthen the institutions themselves.

Your arrival at the head of Expertise France coincides with the new 2023-2027 strategic plan. What direction do you intend to give the agency, bearing in mind that 65% of its business volume is in Africa?

One of the main thrusts is to be increasingly present on the ground, close to and in contact with our partners in the countries where we operate, but also with all the players in civil society, institutions, local authorities and the private sector. We are also engaged in a major initi
ative to decentralize our activities in countries where we are beginning to have a significant portfolio of projects. We are in the process of setting up country offices in the Comoros, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Tunisia, and this is one of the priorities for deployment and implementation next year.

The agency’s actions are in line with the priorities of the Presidential Development Council. I can mention some of them. In Africa, of course, there is the question of adapting to climate change in general, combined with preserving vital carbon reserves, i.e. forests and oceans. These two priorities can be found in the Gulf of Guinea, but also in the Congo Basin.

Expertise France, like the other subsidiaries of the AFD group, is also committed to involving civil society more closely in its programs. Through what approach?

Working with civil society is of course still our hallmark, sometimes in a European format through a ‘Team Europe’, since we work a lot with Enabel (the Belgian development agency) and GIZ (th
e German cooperation agency) that have joint approaches to European funding to support entrepreneurship and innovation, or to enable the development of the private sector and infrastructure, which is also a priority of the President’s Development Council.

We must also invest in young people and education. We have a strong presence in training centers, having supported a total of 186 centers, many of them in Africa. We also invest a lot in health. We have supported 1979 structures, but there is still room for improvement. In addition, one of my top priorities is the promotion of women’s rights and gender equality, which is a cross-cutting dimension of our projects and, as you know, contributes to France’s feminist diplomacy.

Relations between certain African countries and France are strained, as recent events in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have shown. In this context, how can Expertise France continue its work in the region?

We are a French cooperation operator and we always intervene at the request of our
partners, which is really our mandate and our mission. We will never impose ourselves. This is very much part of Expertise France’s policy. Our agency is quite young and we have a lot of very committed young colleagues who make enormous use of local expertise and regional exchanges. We always intervene in response to requests. Of course, if we are asked not to intervene, we don’t intervene. But we can see that there is a strong demand in Africa to work alongside governments. We are positioning ourselves more through the European format. So, we’re sharing experiences, but at the end of the day each state remains sovereign, each state chooses its own development path. We are also working with the diaspora through our Meet Africa program to build entrepreneurial capacity. We have funded 170 entrepreneurs and provided technical assistance to 140.

We still have a real need, both in French-speaking Africa and to support other actors. We also have sports-related projects, particularly in North Africa. It’s a way of
changing the way we work, of writing a new history. I’m thinking in particular of the Basketball Experience program, where we work with the NBA to support and inspire sports federations, particularly in Morocco, but also in Kenya and Senegal. This is a way of promoting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through sport, which is closely linked to health issues. Africa has a very young population, so sport is a vehicle for the values we want to promote.

You also support the development of digital technology on the continent. What is your approach?

One of our priorities is to support digital entrepreneurship. This allows us to mobilize all these digital issues. It is also an institutional issue: we mobilize governments in their management to ensure a better transparency process. The PAGOF program (programme d’appui aux gouvernements ouverts francophones) is a good example of this, contributing to the openness and accountability of governments in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Morocco and Tunisia.

Finally, what
is your roadmap for the beginning of your mandate and the coming months?

I will soon be travelling to Tunisia to launch what I think is a very interesting project called ‘Savoir Eco’. This involves promoting dialogue on economic issues, including by funding Tunisian research and knowledge institutions. We are also strengthening civil society by giving it the means to participate in debates between academics and think tanks on economic issues. I think this illustrates our position: both as a forum for exchange and as a catalyst for dialogue that will be uniquely local. We will continue to support the actors involved in knowledge production in Africa. This is an approach that needs to be supported. Ultimately, it is the universities and African thinkers who will inspire their governments and their policies.

Source: Africa News Agency