📅 2 December 2021 🕟 3:00 – 7:30 PM
Virtual
Agence Française de Développement (AFD) will be 80 years old this year. With headquarters first in London and then in Algiers, it was founded by General de Gaulle on December 2, 1941, to finance the liberation efforts of Free France. Since then, the institution has kept the spirit of resistance and humanism at the heart of its mission to combat environmental disruption and inequality around the world.
For nearly a century, AFD has been supporting solidarity actions all over the globe, as close as possible to the grassroots. The mission is carried out for and with others—those who live elsewhere, speak other languages, and look at the world through other eyes, and whose destiny is linked to their own, now more than ever.
In a “world in common,” the societies discover each other and, mutually inspired, emerge transformed. The crises of the times urge the organization to build collectively new kinds of cooperation based on listening, commitment, and mutual assistance, which are the only sustainable answers to our societies’ ills. This is the message of the 2015 sustainable development goals (SDGs)—and a message that AFD Group wants to continue to put into action.
Lastly, this ceremony will also be a time for commitment. Just two months after the New Africa-France Summit in Montpellier, this anniversary will also be a time for concrete proposals for action to build the new path to be taken. Ambitious announcements will be made, representative of a philosophy that strives to go beyond development assistance and begin the era of mutual community investments.
