France is to prioritise foreign aid programmes that areas where the country has a strong self-interest or expertise, the country’s global development minister has told The Independent – having joined a host of nations that have slashed aid budgets.
France’s minister for international partnerships Éléonore Caroit – whose role was renamed from minister for development last year – said that France was now explicitly seeking returns from its development relationships.
“Part of your development financing also needs to go into sectors where you have an interest, because you have a competitive advantage or particular know-how as a country, then you will also be able to better address [development] challenges,” she said.
Like the UK and the US, France has been making heavy cuts to its foreign aid budget, having cut it five times in just two years. The latest data shows that France spent $13.8bn (£10.3bn) on foreign aid in 2025, which is down from a peak of $17.7bn in 2022. The UK, meanwhile, spent $17.5bn on foreign aid in 2025, which is down from a peak of $21.7bn in 2020.
The latest French budget for 2026 confirmed cuts of £695m to the French aid budget, which represented the second most significant cut to a government department (down 18 per cent compared to 2025) as the country tries to address its unsustainable debt burden.
A new global development strategy has been launched in tandem, where partnerships and knowledge-sharing is prioritised with more wealthy developing countries, and grant-based financing is preserved for the fragile and conflict-affected countries that most need it. Not unlike the UK.
But, speaking with The Independent, Ms Caroit was more vocal about her desire for France to gain economic returns from its development relationships than the UK typically is. “If we were talking about climate, France happens to have great companies that are top builders of trains, public transportation systems, and water treatment,” she said. “So we will, as a priority, invest in these areas rather than solar panels, where we don’t have an industry”.
“It’s not that we are tying our aid to French companies investing, but we are really looking at sectors where there is French experience that can be helpful to a country, and where we can also find our own interest,” Ms Caroit added.
For Mikaela Gavas at the Center for Global Development, Ms Caroit’s comments reflect a broader shift in Europe where governments are “deliberately steering development finance toward its own industrial strengths”.
“In practice, that means the kinds of projects that get funded will increasingly be shaped by European [or French] commercial interests and competitiveness priorities, rather than by development needs or partner-country preference,” she said.
The language used by Ms Caroit is much more bullish than the language used by Jenny Chapman, the UK’s development minister, who has framed international development partnerships as a means of sharing UK expertise, rather than gaining something back in return.
At a recent CGD event, for example, Baroness Chapman revealed that the UK had explicitly discussed incorporating “national interest” into the aid strategy and decided against doing so.
According to CGD’s Ian Mitchell, the UK’s new focus on “communities of expertise” – described as “hubs” in which expertise on areas including climate and energy, education, health, finance, and governance can be shared – also reflects a desire for development to bring benefits to areas where the UK has key strengths, even if the expressed self-interest is more veiled than France.
“In either case, the benefits of prioritising domestic companies or sectors through aid are at best vanishingly small and could even be damaging domestically,” Mr Mitchell said, adding that the outcome could be to simply “subsidise less efficient domestic organisations [or companies]”.
On the UK, Ms Caroit said: “I do believe that France and the UK are like-minded in general, because we understand that for development to be sustainable, you need the country that is receiving the investments to be in the driving seat, and they need to be empowered by the relationship.”
More blatant transactional partnerships are being developed by the US under Donald Trump, who effectively closed the US Agency for International Development (USAID) upon returning to the White House last year. Instead, the US has been demanding everything from health data to mineral rights in return for foreign aid as part of country-to-country deals.
Ms Caroit said he still believes putting public money towards development is “perhaps the best way that money can be spent,” if it also helps provide a platform to being in extra funding via private investors and other routes. She added: “There’s also no point in investing in war and defence if you don’t also invest in development, which bring peace and stability”.
Within this year’s French government budget, the biggest cuts were to multilateral aid, to institutions such as the UN ( down 42 per cent), as well as to humanitarian aid (down 41.2 per cent). These cuts come despite the fact that there is widespread concern among liberal democracies over attacks on multilateral institutions at the moment, as well as the fact that humanitarian crises are escalating the world over amid the climate crisis as well as ongoing conflicts in places like Sudan and the Middle East.
Ms Caroit, however, said that it would be “wrong” to think that France was turning its back on multilateralism. “Quite the contrary: We have maintained our financing for UN agencies… a lot of our funds also go to the European Union which also becomes multilateral as the money is then pooled together,” she said.
France also recently co-hosted its own development conference, Africa Forward, alongside the Kenyan government in Nairobi. The event saw more than 35 heads of government attend, and the announcement of French Investments worth $27bn (£20bn) into areas including the energy transition, digital and AI, the maritime economy and agriculture.
Many of the changes made to France’s development strategy would have been made regardless of the need to cut foreign aid, Ms Caroit said, as there has been a long-term need to better direct public and private development funds towards areas where they will have the biggest impact.
“Public money for education, health and other areas is required for stability, and to show global solidarity,” she said. “But we have also seen situations – for instance in Haiti – where tonnes of public money has gone in and the result has been very disappointing [in terms of creating stability].
“That’s why we need flexibility in how we finance different kinds of things, so that different development challenges can be best addressed,” she added.
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
