The France-Africa Summit will be held on Monday, May 11, and Tuesday, May 12, in Nairobi, Kenya.
For the first time, France is organizing “Africa Forward” outside French-speaking countries.
This summit was preceded, earlier in the year, by the deployment in the Kenyan capital of the French Development Agency (AFD). This establishment, which funds development projects in Africa, indeed appears as one of the main instruments of French soft power on the continent.
As a reminder, on January 19 in Paris, the AFD signed an establishment agreement with Kenya, thereby formalizing its presence in the country.
According to observers, this marks a turning point in France’s new Africa strategy, where the economy thus becomes the main lever of the new vision of French diplomacy in East Africa, with a new objective: to establish itself in this part of the continent, far from the military logic that has shown its limits, notably in the Sahel.
