AFD works to implement France’s policies of development and international solidarity. Our actions include financing for the public sector and for NGOs, publication of research, training on sustainable development, and awareness raising in France. In this way, we help finance, guide, and accelerate transitions toward a fairer and more resilient world.
Together with our partners, we build shared solutions for people. Our teams are involved in more than 2,700 projects to promote common goods in 120 countries, in territories in crisis, and in Overseas Territories. The projects deal with climate change (projects aiming to be 100% in line with the Paris Agreement), gender equality, biodiversity, peace (via the Minka Peace and Resilience Fund), education, and health. This is how AFD Group contributes to the commitment of France and the French to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for a World in Common.
It’s through our “Team France” and “Team Europe” development platforms that, together with our partners, we carry out actions for our clients—not only multilateral and bilateral partners, but also civil society organizations, foundations, local governments, research centers, and development banks. In fact, we work with some 530 public development banks – most of which participated in the first two Finance in Common summits – as well as the 27 banks that for the last 10 years have formed the International Development Finance Club (IDFC), chaired by AFD.
To meet AFD Group’s objectives, we invested €11.4 billion in foreign countries and in Overseas France in 2023. Thanks to this, French development assistance grew to 0.55% of GNP. It will reach 0.7% by 2025.
The French Parliament passed the Law on “solidarity development and the fight against global inequality” on August 4, 2021. The Law provided for integration of Expertise France, the interministerial agency for international technical cooperation, into AFD Group on January 1, 2022. AFD Group’s operational platform can now provide both financial and technical assistance, backed up by a unique range of sustainable development instruments to serve our clients.
Expertise France works alongside partner countries to advise and support them in strengthening their public policies. Technical cooperation, which rounds out our financial assistance for development, is a key aspect of France’s response to the environmental, health, social, economic, and security challenges facing countries today.
In close collaboration with French public institutions and the European Union, Expertise France responds to requests from partner countries that seek to improve the quality of their public policies to meet these challenges. Expertise France’s role is to design and implement projects on a national or regional scale in fields of public action. We also mobilize French, European, and international technical expertise, both public and private, to support our projects and partners.
With the transfer of expertise, we help promote proven working methods, recognized legal and technical standards, and a vision of economic development and governance that complies with the rule of law and human rights. We also promote peer dialog, as it helps form sustainable, partner-based relationships among players in an international community committed to building a World in Common.
Having carried out more than 350 projects in 147 countries in 2023, at a value of some €388 million, Expertise France is now the second leading technical cooperation agency in the world behind GIZ Germany.
Proparco is an AFD Group subsidiary dedicated exclusively to the private sector. We have been working for more than 45 years to promote sustainable economic, social, and environmental development.
Proparco helps finance and support businesses and financial institutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Our actions focus on key development sectors such as infrastructure (mainly for renewable energies), agribusiness, financial institutions, health, and education. They not only benefit local companies and projects in emerging and developing countries, but also help strengthen the role of private players in reaching the SDGs. For example, Proparco finances companies whose activity helps create jobs and decent incomes, provide essential goods and services, and fight climate change. The results are sustainable economic growth and reduction in poverty.
Over the years, Proparco has gradually diversified its financial tools, its geographical scope of action, and its share ownership to become one of the leading European Development Finance Institutions (EDFIs), with a share capital of €984 million.
The new Law on “solidarity development and the fight against global inequality” is designed to give AFD Group’s action a framework as well as support and guidance. It strengthens our objective of working with all our partners against the root causes of crises, by helping to guide the most vulnerable countries, particularly in Africa, toward more resilient, more inclusive, and more sustainable growth models.
The Law also seeks to fully integrate French development policy into the multilateral framework that the international community set for itself in 2015 with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the Addis Ababa Action Plan on Financing for Development. This framework is essential in our efforts to forge a collective response to contemporary global challenges. It also has a provision for restituting “ill-gotten gains”—already put into action along with the return in early November 2021 of artwork stolen during the colonial period from Abomey Palace in Benin.
The new Law also calls for transparency, evaluation, and monitoring of AFD Group’s actions and outcomes in the field.
To find out more about AFD Group’s activities, consult our latest activity report.
In 1941, during the fury of World War II, General de Gaulle created the Central Fund for Free France (CCFL) in London. The CCFL acted simultaneously as treasury department, central bank, and development bank for the French territories that had rallied to the Allied cause. Its zone of influence spread very quickly, in both the French overseas territories and in Africa, and its monetary role diminished as it began to target project financing. Over the years, the CCFL, which became Agence Française de Développement (AFD) in 1998, has made changes to its missions, partnerships, and geographical scope so that it can adapt to the new challenges of international development.
Nowadays, AFD Group, which includes Agence Française de Développement (AFD); its subsidiary Proparco dedicated to private sector financing; and Expertise France, the technical cooperation agency, supports numerous projects that concretely improve the daily lives of people in more than 160 countries and in 11 French Overseas Territories and Departments.
