Sustainable development is underway on the African continent. The French Development Agency (AFD) is delivering its second class of trainees in sustainable development. For twenty weeks, the 29 participants of 17 nationalities were equipped with five training modules including entrepreneurship, finance, agriculture, education and culture in sustainable growth.
“It is a training course that is totally adapted to the constraints and specificities of Africa today, through conferences, field visits and case studies anchored in the realities of the continent,” explains Christelle Bitouzet, the academic director of Lead Campus within the AFD Academy based in Marseille, France.
This training is the result of a partnership between AFD and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC Paris), an institution located in France, the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa’s oldest university, and the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique (UM6P) located in the Moroccan city of Ben Guérir, 73 km from Marrakech. Since its launch in 2016, the initiative supported by the impact investment company Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P), has already trained around 100 young Africans.
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“These learning tours encourage inspiration and creativity, sources of innovation, for their own structure,” said Bertrand Walckenaer, AFD’s Deputy Chief Executive Officer, at the end-of-training ceremony he chaired on Friday 8 July at the HEC Paris campus. For his part, Eloïc Peyrache, the Dean of this business school, announced the launch of the recruitment of the next cohort for the start of the academic year in October 2022.
Benoit-Ivan Wansi