Interview
“Strengthening institutions and public policies, even in times of crisis”
Confirmed growth, new field offices, and a renewed commitment to crisis response… 2025 was a year of consolidation, transformation, and looking ahead for Expertise France.
Christophe Lecourtier, you took over as CEO of AFD Group in May 2026. What will the Group’s priorities be in the coming years?
C. L. My priority is to rebuild a relationship of trust around AFD Group, both with the French government and with our teams. The world has changed: power politics are making a comeback, several major development donors are scaling back their commitments, and public finances are under increasing pressure. We therefore need to make choices, guided by one overarching principle: systematically seeking a “triple dividend.”
The first dividend is the development impact we deliver for our partners. Every project must address their needs and produce measurable results in terms of employment, economic growth, and access to essential infrastructure, particularly for the most vulnerable populations. We will focus our grants on the least developed countries while maintaining our ambitions on climate, biodiversity, and gender equality.
The second dividend involves better aligning the Group’s activities with the interests of France and its citizens. We fully embrace our role as an instrument of French foreign policy, operating under the authority of French ambassadors and increasingly concentrating our resources where our partners’ interests converge with those of France and Europe. We also want to be a more effective partner for French businesses, working in coordination with Team France.
The third dividend is internal: making our business model more robust and efficient so that we can achieve more with limited resources and maximize the impact of every euro of public funding mobilized.
Our new 2027-2029 Means and Objectives Contract reflects this direction, with 20 indicators focused on results and impact rather than simply on the volume of activity. This represents a cultural shift. Our ambition is therefore neither to withdraw nor to pursue short-sighted influence, but to forge a third path: responding to our partners’ priorities while advancing the interests of France and Europe.
What role should Expertise France play within the Group?
C. L. Expertise France is a cornerstone of AFD Group. Its integration has brought together three complementary areas of expertise: development financing through AFD, private sector investment through Proparco, and technical cooperation through Expertise France.
This complementarity is a major asset at a time when competition among development agencies is intensifying and budgets are shrinking. Expertise France provides what financing alone cannot deliver: long-term support for reforms and public policies, institutional capacity building, and the mobilization of French expertise. Expertise France operates in strategically important regions, particularly Africa, the Middle East, the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific, including in the most fragile contexts. Notably, it was the first European bilateral agency to respond to the needs in Ukraine. Its work is a vehicle for influence and economic diplomacy, helping to establish regulatory and institutional frameworks conducive to development and investment.
We now want to take operational synergies further. For the first time, AFD’s and Expertise France’s performance agreements will be aligned, with shared objectives for strengthening synergies. The goal is to offer more integrated Group solutions, combining public financing, private investment, and implementation capacity from the earliest stages. Expertise France can identify and develop opportunities that AFD or Proparco can subsequently support. Conversely, its technical expertise can enhance the impact and sustainability of AFD’s financing.
Expertise France also plays a major role in mobilizing European funding: more than half of its activity is financed by the European Union. This creates a powerful multiplier effect for every euro of French public funding.
Our objective, therefore, is to better integrate our three areas of expertise to collectively increase our impact, our ability to exert influence, and the resilience of our business model. Expertise France is central to this ambition.
Working in fragile and crisis contexts is part of the core business of a technical cooperation agency such as Expertise France.
Jérémie Pellet, how would you assess 2025?
J. P. For Expertise France, 2025 was a year of consolidation, transformation and forward planning. It first marked the tenth anniversary of the French interministerial agency. This is an opportunity to take stock of how far we have come: in a decade, we have become Europe’s second-largest technical cooperation agency, with nearly 2,700 staff members working in almost 170 countries. The past year also confirmed our growth momentum, despite a constrained and complex environment, with revenue exceeding €570 million, more than 400 projects under way and a managed volume of nearly €2.6 billion.
Beyond the figures, we should also highlight significant progress in structuring our agency in the field. We continued to decentralize our activities so as to work as closely as possible with our partners. We now have nearly 40 locations abroad, including 13 country directorates covering 15 countries, and new priority geographies such as Angola, Ethiopia and Madagascar, in addition to the shared AFD Group network. We intend to further strengthen our presence in the field by structuring regional directorates, in order to increase our management capacity and impact.
The year was marked by numerous crises. How did the agency adapt?
J. P. Working in fragile and crisis contexts is part of the core business of a technical cooperation agency such as Expertise France. In 2025, we continued to adapt our activities in severely degraded environments, including Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Haiti and the Palestinian Territories, where our teams work every day alongside our partners. Our ambition is simple: to strengthen institutions and public policies, even in times of crisis, by responding to emergencies and, above all, by ensuring the safety of our staff. This is what we are doing in Ukraine in the areas of justice and health, in Haiti by strengthening state institutions, and in Lebanon by supporting civil society organizations.
Beyond these security crises and fragile contexts, which require us to rethink our action and our methods of intervention, Expertise France must also adapt to the reshaping of development aid, including the decline in French budget allocations. Strengthening the partnership with European institutions, diversifying our partners and donors, increasing our accountability and the impact of our projects, and reinforcing synergies within AFD Group are all efforts we must continue to pursue. They will be essential if we are to maintain our level of activity and continue implementing France’s investment policy grounded in solidarity and sustainability, in support of efforts to address global challenges.
Interview conducted in October 2026