(Ecofin Agency) - The French Development Agency (AFD) has disbursed €18.7 million (about CFA12.3 billion) to support the development of excellence centers in Côte d'Ivoire, as part of the African Centers of Excellence (CEA) project.
The loan agreement was signed on March 10, 2020, between the Ivorian Minister of Economy and Finance, Adama Coulibaly and the French Ambassador to Côte d'Ivoire, Gilles Huberson.

The centers to be developed will focus on climate change, biodiversity and sustainable agriculture, development of training in statistics and quantitative economics, waste recycling into high value-added products, mining, and environment.

The CEA project will make it possible to stimulate the training and research capacities of the regional centers of excellence, which are likely to attract the best students, to develop the quality of their training, particularly at the Master's and Doctorate levels, and to steer their research activities around national and regional development issues.

This project will benefit students from three public universities in Côte d'Ivoire: the Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Statistique et d'Economie Appliquée (ENSEA) in Abidjan, and the Institut National Polytechnique Houphouët-Boigny (INPHB) in Yamoussoukro

André Chadrak