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.
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.
Working in fragile and crisis contexts is part of the core business of a technical cooperation agency such as Expertise France.
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.
Rémy Rioux, you will soon leave AFD Group after ten years at its helm. What lessons and conclusions do you draw from this mandate?
R. R. In ten years, we have restored France’s strong capacity to cooperate and invest around the world, driven by a powerful and coherent movement since the Paris Climate Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for the SDGs. Together with all our AFD Group colleagues, whom I warmly thank, we have built an effective, powerful and respected platform, which has now reached the critical size needed to support the most vulnerable – in the face of Covid and multiplying crises – and to contribute to the collective management of our global commons: climate and nature together, demographics and inequalities, technology and peace.
Our Group is larger, with activity that has doubled and more than 5,000 staff deployed around the world. It is more partnership-based, with stronger national roots and an international role recognized by the major multilateral and European institutions. It is more innovative, investing in new fields such as transition minerals, migration, culture and sport. Finally, our Group is more robust, thanks to consolidated financial fundamentals that enable us to focus on the quality and impact of our investments.
Ten years is also the age of Expertise France. What role has Expertise France played so far in building AFD Group?
R. R. Expertise France has strengthened AFD. The creation of AFD Group on January 1, 2022, following a decision in principle in 2018, completed a reform of our development policy that had been under way for more than twenty years, since January 1, 1999. I am very proud to have contributed to it. By bringing together all the instruments useful to our cooperation policy within a single institution, we created a unique tool, representing France in the field in times of peace as well as in times of war and extreme vulnerability. Look at Ukraine: Expertise France was the first to be present, thanks to its technical cooperation and direct project-management expertise, and then the entire Group deployed. Expertise France has also enabled us to be even more European, and also more French, by building on the mobilization of French expertise. Expertise France has contributed to the innovation dynamics that I strongly encouraged within AFD, particularly on the links between security and development.
Conversely, AFD has also been highly beneficial to Expertise France. We now have a shared network, multiple projects funded by AFD, ever-stronger operational synergies, and we are opening up our knowledge, training and financial and non-financial instruments in support of our common mission: to help build a world in common through our country’s international action.
How do you see the coming years for AFD Group?
R. R. A new phase clearly opened in 2025, marked by very strong geopolitical tensions and a sharp decline in budgetary cooperation. We need to revisit our approach and redefine a paradigm for development finance and technical cooperation that resonates with our time. I believe AFD anticipated this and, over the past ten years, made many proposals to inform the debate. It is now up to Christophe Lecourtier to find the way forward. I wish him every success. I leave with a sense of duty fulfilled and immense gratitude to AFD Group teams for this magnificent and useful decade.
Interview conducted in April 2026