Interview with Sabrina Guerard

Your role in AFD’s Campus Group requires you to question AFD’s current ways of doing things. How do you introduce the (de)colonisation of aid into your discussions?

Sabrina Guerard: Before answering that question, may I say something about AFD’s Campus Group? It’s AFD’s corporate school, and it’s unusual in that it’s intended for people both inside and outside AFD. The Campus Group works to develop a common understanding of the challenges faced by a world which is fundamentally changing; it enables experiences to be shared, and the required skills to be acquired by the different professional bodies represented in the Group, and by those in the global South who are responsible for the conception and implementation of policies or projects which speed up transition processes.

To meet the challenges of the 21st century, the Campus Group’s training programmes are based on the idea that it’s essential that training should be done differently and propose new skills. We call it ‘transformational training’. We need to go beyond what is obvious, or what we already believe, and stimulate new awareness. We can then take action and question our approaches and assumptions, including those derived from a colonial mindset.

Thus, the Campus Group aims to create experiences which we describe as transformational, by means of individual training programmes that are very introspective, taken by clusters of people, with five stages. The first stage is diagnosis, achieving a proper awareness that our viewpoint is fixed and territorialised. Then we identify what motivates us, whether personally or as part of our organisation: our energy, our goals. We then imagine what [changes] are possible and desirable and attempt to define them in terms of actions that will help us realise them in a sustainable way, with the support of a community of other like-minded actors. The Campus Group’s PLAY programme is based on this U-shaped curve of transformation.

Beyond the historical starting point, the value-added of the Campus Group in discussions about coloniality is to make us question our professional practices via the transformational approach I’ve described, which speaks simultaneously to mind, body and emotions. The aim is not to stop at discussion, but to act.

How do you think the question of the decolonisation of aid affects relations between donors, NGOs and local actors?

S.G. : Encouraged by the President of the Republic, France is engaged in a process of questioning colonial attitudes. France’s presence in Africa and our policy of development cooperation are evolving and have yet to slough off their old skin. We’ve been engaged in this process for something like twenty years, in response to the rise of global challenges, the end of the stark division between the blocs of North and South and the fundamental transformation of Africa, illustrated by recent events in the Sahel. Renewing France’s policies on Africa, especially on development cooperation, and more broadly changing attitudes and professional practice in the French public institutions which are active there, all need to be speeded up. The same is true of the underlying narrative. The 2017 Ouagadougou Conference and the 2021 Montpellier Summit were inflection points that enabled development actors to make progress on these issues.

Maintaining our relationship with these [partner] countries entails sending signals that indicate that we’ve understood ‘how we must change’ and then translating this into concrete action. The first change is perhaps to clarify why we are interested in trying to agree on cooperation policy. Clarifying our own interest, and explaining it to partners, is the essential starting point of a relationship based on trust, treating the Other as the subject not the object of development policy. Asymmetry between countries is a given, and the trend is for cooperation policy to attempt to lessen the inequalities. What is at stake in the relationship is due less to this asymmetry, but more to the posture of domination that is still too often evident in cooperation policy. This is what we are criticised for, and this is what we must work on at individual level, at organisational level and across the system as a whole.

What are the principal challenges facing donors trying to further a more equitable and decolonised approach to aid, and how might they be met?

S.G. : Awareness-raising and changes of attitude are complex and take time. Changes of attitude entail being already aware that there’s a problem. A relationship of dominance is usually unconscious, so first you need to identify it and deconstruct it, then work on it at the individual then the organisational level: it’s a long job! Plenty of humility and perseverance are required, if you’re not simply following a fashionable trend, but sincerely attempting to make progress.

Care should be taken to avoid falling back into domination mode by insisting that coloniality/decolonisation must be on the agenda. Obviously, it’s done with good intentions, but in the end, it means you’re deciding what is or might be ‘good’ for the Other. Instead, we need to maintain a dialogue with, and listen to, partners, allow them power and space, including on the way they themselves would like to treat the question of coloniality.

Finally, in practical terms, these learning journeys supported by the Campus Group may take the form of residential training lasting two or three days, like the ‘Plaisians Group’ (see the box below) or, similarly, AFD’s in-house meeting in Arles. These meetings enabled areas of work to be identified, such as the need to clarify our interest in and our expectations of this [revised] cooperation policy; or reflection on decision-making processes and power relationships in the procedures for implementing projects financed by AFD; accountability initiatives; evaluation; the right use of technical expertise, with everyone’s role or function defined; and there’s an additional area of work on communication about the operations AFD finances, remembering to put ourselves in the right place in the photograph, that is in the background.

We’re testing these formats and need to improve them further. The next step will be opening up these meetings – intended for exchange and reflection – to partners from the regions of the global South, to set up new frameworks for dialogue based on attitudes we’ve reviewed, so that we can talk about our relationship, about what makes it what it is, and also about concrete modalities of work.

It’s a huge job, which will take time. The essential point is that we approach it with humility and in collaboration with the actors directly concerned, including the partners we cooperate with as well as civil society, the private sector, foundations and parliamentarians. There are swarms of similar initiatives everywhere, especially in the humanitarian aid sector. It’s our wish that we come together to construct subsequent phases of this policy.