France Is Pivoting to Anglophone Africa. Before Africa Celebrates, It Should Ask Why Francophone Africa Is Being Left Behind.

The System That Was Supposed to Develop Francophone Africa

Fourteen countries across West and Central Africa, home to a combined population of approximately 210 million people, use the CFA franc. The currency's name stands for Communauté Financière Africaine in its West African form and Coopération Financière en Afrique Centrale in its Central African form. Its history is longer than the independence of the nations that use it. The CFA franc was created on December 26, 1945, during the colonial era, with a fixed exchange rate against the French franc. The countries that gained independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s inherited rather than chose the currency system, though France has consistently argued that membership is voluntary and that member states have made sovereign decisions to remain.

The architecture of the CFA system rests on four pillars whose combined effect on monetary sovereignty is the subject of the most consequential debate in Francophone African economics. First, a fixed exchange rate pegged first to the French franc and since 1999 to the euro at a rate of exactly 655.957 CFA francs to one euro. Second, guaranteed convertibility, meaning that France guarantees that CFA francs can always be exchanged for euros at the fixed rate. Third, the reserve deposit requirement, under which member countries were required to deposit a share of their foreign exchange reserves in a special operational account at the French Treasury. Fourth, free capital transfer within the franc zone, which in practice has facilitated capital outflows rather than intra-regional investment.

Since 2005, the two central banks have been required to deposit 50 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in a special French Treasury operating account, plus an additional 20 percent for financial liabilities. Thus member states only retained 30 percent of reserves within their borders. The practical meaning of this arrangement is that the capital that Francophone African countries generate through their exports, their tax revenues, and their resource extraction has historically been held primarily in Paris rather than deployed in domestic capital markets, lent to domestic businesses, or invested in domestic infrastructure. The AEO 2025 that Uchumi360 documented in the institutional conversion synthesis article calculated that Africa could mobilise an additional USD 1.43 trillion in domestic resources annually with better policies. For CFA franc countries, the reserve deposit mechanism was a structural impediment to exactly that domestic capital mobilisation for the better part of seven decades.

The Poverty Record That the Partnership Cannot Explain

The most direct empirical test of whether France's Francophone Africa engagement served the development interests of Africophone populations or France's commercial and geopolitical interests is the poverty data. Membership of the franc zone is synonymous with poverty and underdevelopment, as evidenced by the fact that 11 of its 15 adherents are classed Least Developed Countries.

Encompassing 14 countries in francophone West and Central Africa, the CFA franc zone faces climate change, poverty traps, demographic pressures, and natural resource management hurdles. Despite decades of international aid flows, the region has struggled to gain the upper hand in reducing poverty.

This is not a recent phenomenon attributable to the Sahel's political instability or the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a structural pattern that has characterised Francophone Africa throughout the post-independence era. Countries with deep, continuous, institutionalised relationships with France, relationships that included preferential commercial access, monetary stability through the CFA peg, and French military protection, have performed persistently worse on poverty reduction, industrial development, and economic diversification than the theoretical benefits of those relationships would predict.

Economists affirm that the CFA franc is a barrier to industrialisation and structural transformation, serving neither to stimulate trade integration between user nations, nor boost bank lending to their economies. The credit-to-GDP ratio stands at around 10 to 25 percent for CFA countries, but is approximately 60 percent or above for sub-Saharan Africa broadly. This credit gap is the most specific and most consequential economic consequence of the CFA system's architecture. A fixed exchange rate pegged to the euro constrains the monetary policy flexibility that central banks use to manage credit conditions in response to domestic economic conditions. A reserve deposit requirement that holds the majority of foreign exchange reserves in Paris reduces the capital available to domestic banking systems for lending to the private sector. The combined effect is a financial system that is more stable in narrow currency terms and significantly less productive in developmental terms than one with genuine monetary sovereignty would be.

The CFA franc also encourages massive capital outflows, and due to the fixed exchange rate regime, pushes that money to Europe and more frequently to France. The capital outflow dimension connects directly to the AEO 2025's documentation that Africa is a net creditor to the world, sending more capital out than it receives in all external inflows combined. For CFA franc countries, the outflow mechanism is structural and embedded in the monetary architecture itself rather than simply being a consequence of governance failures or illicit financial flows.

The Reform That Changed the Name and Left the Structure

France announced in December 2019 that it would reform the West African CFA franc system. The reform had three components. The countries using the currency would no longer have to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury. France withdrew from the governance bodies of the Central Bank of West African States. The currency would be renamed the Eco.

The announcement was celebrated in some quarters as a meaningful step toward monetary sovereignty. The analytical assessment is more restrained. The exchange regime remains unchanged, with the fixed parity between the euro and the Eco and continued convertibility ensured by France. This change allows France to wield power over the reserves, but rids it of the obligation to bail out former CFA member states in the event of a crisis. Instead, countries will be referred to the IMF. France and former CFA countries will operate under a new set of rules that continue to benefit France and place African countries at a disadvantage.

The reforms have stalled. The Eco has not been implemented. Target dates have been missed repeatedly. The latest ECOWAS target is now July 2027. As of 2025, Central African states still maintain the 50 percent reserve rule, and reforms have been slower. This zone remains tightly bound to France's financial oversight.

The Central African CFA franc covering Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon has not been reformed at all. Six countries and their combined population continue to operate under an unreformed system whose reserve deposit requirement and monetary constraints remain exactly as they were before the 2019 announcement that was widely reported as a watershed moment in the France-Africa monetary relationship.

In May 2025, Senegal's new Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko stated that the CFA franc poses both a symbolic and economic problem. Sonko's statement reflects a generational shift in Francophone African political leadership whose discomfort with the CFA architecture is more direct and less diplomatically managed than the previous generation of leaders whose relationships with France were deeper and more personally invested.

The Sahel Rupture: Political Expression of an Economic Failure

The military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger that expelled French troops and cancelled military cooperation agreements are most easily explained as expressions of anti-French sentiment driven by the colonial legacy narrative that the coup leaders deployed effectively to build popular support. That explanation is accurate but incomplete.

Military coups in the Sahel have often been driven by explicitly anti-French sentiment, with many citizens in Françafrique resenting perceived remnants of colonial-era control. But the resentment has a material foundation that the colonial legacy narrative alone does not fully explain. Citizens of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger who watched their countries remain among the world's poorest despite decades of French engagement, who observed the CFA system's constraints on their governments' ability to respond to economic shocks with monetary policy flexibility, and who experienced the failure of French military presence to resolve the security challenges that the Sahel has faced, had grounds for their resentment that went beyond historical grievance into present-day economic experience.

Ghana's foreign minister Samuel Ablakwa, speaking at the Chatham House think tank in London, said there is a genuine concern in Francophone Africa that their relations with France will have to be reset and that there is a need for a new approach. Ghana is not a CFA franc country and has no military relationship with France. That Ghana's foreign minister is expressing concern about the France-Francophone Africa relationship from the outside reflects how visible the structural failure of that relationship has become to African observers across linguistic boundaries.

The Nairobi Pivot: Recalibration or Relocation?

The pivot is part of what one analyst called the paradox of predation. Through its predatory neocolonial relationships, France underdeveloped its francophone African states. So it is no surprise that it has decided to venture out into the anglophone and lusophone African sphere to profit from business opportunities.

This reading is harsh but analytically grounded. A France that is pivoting toward Anglophone Africa while the structural architecture that constrained Francophone Africa's development, the unreformed Central African CFA franc, the stalled Eco transition, the continued monetary peg to the euro, remains substantially in place is a France that is moving toward markets with better return profiles rather than one that is addressing the structural causes of its traditional partners' underperformance.

The summit rejects bloc mindsets, predation, and new imperialist tendencies and is building partnerships based on real complementarities. The Élysée's own language acknowledges the predation critique. Whether the Nairobi summit represents a genuine break from the economic architecture that generated that critique, or whether it represents France finding new markets in which the same commercial logic applies without the political friction that seventy years of Françafrique has produced in the original sphere, is the question that the summit's outcomes will begin to answer.

The challenge in Nairobi will be to transform rhetorical ambitions into concrete realities. While the discourse promotes a partnership on equal footing, several grey areas remain, particularly regarding the crucial issue of mobility for African entrepreneurs and access to European markets. The visa and mobility question is the most practically significant test of whether France's new partnership rhetoric translates into operational reality. An Anglophone African entrepreneur who is invited to partner with French commercial actors but cannot obtain a French visa to attend the business forums where those partnerships are built is experiencing the same sovereignty asymmetry that the CFA franc system imposed on a monetary level.

What Pan-African Solidarity Actually Requires

The Nairobi summit creates an opportunity that extends beyond Kenya's bilateral relationship with France. It creates an opportunity for the pan-African analytical community, the African Union, and the East African governments that will engage with France's new partnership offer, to insist that the terms of France's Anglophone Africa engagement address the structural failures of its Francophone Africa engagement rather than simply relocating French commercial interests to new markets.

That insistence requires specific demands rather than general calls for partnership on equal terms. The Central African CFA franc's unreformed reserve deposit requirement should be on the agenda at Nairobi not as a bilateral Kenya-France issue but as a continental economic sovereignty issue whose resolution affects six countries and their combined population directly and the credibility of France's new Africa doctrine broadly. The stalled Eco transition's July 2027 target requires concrete institutional support that France's new Africa doctrine should explicitly commit to rather than treating as a matter solely for ECOWAS to resolve.

The capital outflow dynamics that the CFA system has facilitated for seven decades require a development finance response that redirects French commercial and development capital toward the Francophone economies that France's historical engagement constrained, not only toward the Anglophone markets where France now sees better commercial opportunities. Proparco, France's development finance institution, has an explicit mandate to support private sector development in Africa. The distribution of Proparco's portfolio between Francophone and Anglophone Africa, and the trajectory of that distribution over the period since France began its pivot toward Anglophone markets, is a measurable indicator of whether France's new Africa doctrine serves African development interests or French commercial interests.

East Africa's engagement with the Nairobi summit should be conducted from a position of clarity about what it is and is not. It is a genuine opportunity to deepen commercial relationships with a major global economy that is actively seeking new African partnerships and that has development finance instruments, technology companies, and institutional relationships that East African economies can productively engage with. It is not a validation of France's Africa record. It is not a signal that the structural failures of Françafrique are resolved. And it is not a reason to lower the analytical standards that Uchumi360 applies to every investment relationship and every partnership offer directed at the coverage region.

The Bottom Line

France is moving toward Anglophone Africa because the commercial and political returns on its Francophone Africa engagement have declined below the threshold that justifies the investment. That is an honest description of a capital allocation decision, and it should be read as such rather than as a diplomatic realignment driven by genuine partnership ambition.

The Nairobi summit on May 11 and 12, 2026 is significant. The appointment of Tony Elumelu to lead the Africa France Impact Coalition is significant. The first Nigerian presidential state visit to France in twenty years is significant. These are real signals of a real strategic reorientation that East African governments should engage with strategically and without naivety.

But the most important analytical question that Nairobi should force onto the Africa-France agenda is the one that the pivot's architects have not answered: what happens to Francophone Africa? To the 11 of 15 CFA franc zone countries classified as Least Developed Countries? To the six Central African nations whose reserve deposit requirement remains unreformed? To the Eco currency that was announced in 2019 and whose implementation target has now been pushed to July 2027?

A monetary system that holds a former colonial power as the guarantor, regardless of announcements or agreements, will always ultimately fail to eradicate neocolonialism. That observation applies with equal force to a partnership pivot that relocates French commercial interests to new African markets without resolving the structural constraints it leaves behind in the old ones.

Capital does not follow history. That much is true and the Nairobi summit is evidence of it. But development requires more than capital following opportunity. It requires institutions, frameworks, and partnerships that distribute the returns of economic activity in ways that lift populations rather than simply improving the risk-return calculations of the external actors engaging with them. France's new Africa doctrine will be measured not only by what it builds in Nairobi but by what it leaves resolved, or unresolved, in Ndjamena, Bangui, Libreville, Brazzaville, Malabo, and Yaoundé.