One of those hostile regions that we describe, in our jargon, as a “volatile” environment. Located at the border of Sudan, South Sudan, and Chad, this prefecture in the northeastern Central African Republic has been home for nearly 20 years to a group of dedicated workers known as Triangle Génération Humanitaire*…
It all began in 2007, during the Darfur crisis. TGH established its first operational base in the Central African Republic near the Grand Market in Birao (the prefecture’s capital) to assist Sudanese refugees. Political instability rages across the country, and Vakaga—though a thousand kilometers from the capital—is shaken by the shifting alliances of armed groups and successive coup attempts. Neglected by the central government, Vakaga is sinking into a state of stagnation, with its population falling victim to human rights violations on a daily basis. In 2019, clashes between the FPRC (Popular Front for the Rebirth of the Central African Republic) and the MLCJ (Movement of Central African Liberators for Justice) took on the guise of an “ethnic war” (Rounga, Haoussa, and Goula ethnic groups versus the predominantly Kara ethnic group): abuses multiplied, plunging the population into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The TGH base was not spared from looting. Humanitarian access has deteriorated along major routes and in cities alike, but TGH persists—despite the rain and unpredictable security conditions—to provide assistance to the most isolated and vulnerable people. The team will remain in tents for two years to support the emergency response for internally displaced persons. It was during this time that TGH earned the trust of the local population and authorities; this same acceptance now allows the organization to actively involve communities in all its projects, advocate with local, municipal, and prefectural authorities, and achieve results for the area’s development.
A colleague recalls: “We persevered in a spirit of camaraderie because we were passionate about what we did. And there was a touch of madness, too! The Birao field office is still driven by that passion for our work today.”
Twenty years later, the TGH base in Birao is still going strong, thanks to a team dedicated to the human cause, committed to its mission, and capable of adapting its practices and techniques to improve the living conditions of the host population, as well as displaced persons and Sudanese refugees (crises come one after another, yet no two are alike…).
Since 2021, walls and roofs have provided shelter for these workers operating in extreme conditions, who are always ready to go above and beyond to meet urgent humanitarian needs. Traveling along the main routes is not without risk… Delivering aid is a daily challenge in both the dry and rainy seasons.
And yet, this area of operation perfectly illustrates the adaptive, multisectoral approach that the NGO strives to implement across all the fields where it operates (12 countries): a community-based approach, made possible by pooling expertise within its teams and those of its local partners, in support of parastatal organizations. Addressing emergency needs as well as those during the recovery and development phases (short-, medium-, and long-term), and offering a comprehensive range of complementary activities in the areas of education, protection, food security and livelihoods, and water, hygiene, and sanitation—all while preserving social cohesion—will pave the way for the actions taken to have the greatest possible impact. Despite current budget cuts, TGH, with the help of loyal donors, is able to work toward this comprehensive approach in an area where all indicators of public services are in the red.
In this challenging context, TGH is striving to prioritize its response. Many needs remain unmet, and it takes patience and ingenuity to overcome the obstacles encountered along the way.
Thus, as pressure on existing services becomes unsustainable amid new influxes of displaced persons and refugees, food security is threatened, social cohesion is unstable due to a lack of fodder for transhumant herders, and seeds and vaccines are running short, government procurement negotiations and seed laboratories emerge to secure relationships as well as a minimal food supply that is at risk.
Vakaga, the Central African gateway to the Sahel, is the driest prefecture in the CAR. Geographical isolation, compounded by unsafe roads, results in the country’s lowest rates of water and sanitation coverage. The influx of refugees puts pressure on chronically inadequate infrastructure, leading to conflicts over resource use and communal tensions. When no efficient drilling alternative is available locally and an epidemiological risk looms, TGH transports a drilling rig from Europe to meet the drinking water needs of the local population. This invaluable tool, used by TGH’s WASH experts but also made available to all stakeholders working toward this cause, will improve sanitary conditions in the towns and villages of Vakaga.
Until now, only a handful of humanitarian workers had ventured along the dirt roads in the northeastern part of this region. It was rare to encounter anyone on the roads of Birao, Ouandja, Terfel, Ganai, or Boromata.
After 18 years in the shadows, Vakaga is now in the spotlight. A forgotten land has become a sought-after destination… Organizations are flocking to the region as funding looms on the horizon amid a regional crisis. Reinforcements are needed, and the shift is already underway: the time has come for pooling resources, coordinating actions that combine expertise, and establishing a joint organizational framework that optimizes resources to continue strengthening coherence among actors in humanitarian aid, development, and peacebuilding.
The journal publishing these few words will certainly not disagree with me: this world of 10 billion people is full of humanitarian challenges. The TGH team in the Central African Republic has existed since its inception to tackle these challenges, and it is with respect that we pay tribute to them.
Magali Ratajczak.
Magali Ratajczak
Magali Ratajczak starter her humanitarian career as an HR Coordinator in the African Central Republic. TGH opened for her the doors of the Operations world, where she then evolved in Central and North Africa, Europe and Asia. She is now one out of three geographic directors at the headquarters of Triangle Génération Humanitaire in Lyon.
Alain Boinet – Hello Cassilde Brenière. We thank you for this interview for Défis Humanitaires. To begin, for our readers, could you present to us the action of Expertise France and your role.
Cassilde Brenière :
Thank you very much Alain, thank you for coming here to Expertise France and for taking an interest in our agency.
Expertise France is the French agency for international technical cooperation. For my part, I am Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the agency, in charge of operations.
Expertise France was created in 2015 through the merger of six operators previously housed within different ministries. This creation marked a desire for renewal of French technical cooperation. Since then, the agency has experienced significant growth, its turnover has multiplied by five and it is today the second largest European technical cooperation agency, with €570M in activity volume in 2025. We now count more than 2,500 collaborators including 1,700 in the field. It is this local anchoring which moreover constitutes our strength.
We are an interministerial governmental agency and, since 2022, a subsidiary of the French Development Agency (AFD). Our funding comes essentially from the European Union, from AFD and from French ministries.
Our hallmark rests on our capacity to mobilize, often in peer-to-peer approaches, French and European actors, local actors and to co-construct projects in support of public policies.
Alain Boinet – When one visits the Expertise France website, one realizes the very great diversity of your fields of expertise and intervention in the 4 corners of the world. Can you present your areas of action, your missions and your staff, your partnership policy both in the field and in terms of financing.
Cassilde Brenière :
We operate around six major technical domains, structured into departments.
The first is sustainable development where we work on climate, biodiversity, urban policies, circular economy, agriculture and agricultural value chains.
The second is governance notably financial governance stemming from the former agency ADETEF, which merged within Expertise France. We work on support to issues of structuring taxation, customs, the fight against corruption, budget management, or even the public expenditure chain. We also intervene on strengthening the consideration of human rights, gender, migration, justice and State reform.
The third domain is that of peace, stability and security. We are present in several crisis contexts such as in Syria, in Haiti, in Ethiopia, or even in Ukraine, where we intervene in a cross-cutting manner since 2016. I will come back to this.
The fourth domain, which is our primary field of action and also the most important in terms of project implementation, is health. L’Initiative, which we carry, aims to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. This is a vast program financed by the French contribution to the Global Fund. But we also work to guarantee resilient and equitable health systems, notably by relying on the consideration of human resources in health.
The fifth domain concerns education, vocational training and social protection, with a French model often mobilized in exchanges of experience.
Finally, the sixth domain, which is growing strongly, corresponds to support for the private sector, the sustainable economy and the business environment, in order to promote private investments in partner countries.
On the geographical level, more than 50% of our activity is in Africa, but the specificity of our mandate allows us to intervene in all countries of the world, such as in Latin America, in Asia or in Europe, notably in Ukraine and in Greece.
To do so, we work with many partners: French public administrations (ministries, Court of Auditors..), hospitals, AP-HP, university hospitals, but also local and international civil society.
Alain Boinet – Among all your partners, there is notably civil society and national and international NGOs. How do you cooperate concretely with these actors and what is the specific added value of this sector.
Cassilde Brenière :
Civil society is a major partner of Expertise France. Last year, around 100 million euros were mobilized in direct funding from French civil society but above all from local civil society.
We work, directly, with many associations; for example on the PAGOF program (Partnership for an Open Government) in several West African countries, in Morocco, in Senegal, in Côte d’Ivoire and in Tunisia. The aim is to strengthen public transparency and access to data, by working both with States and with members of civil society. We also mobilize CFI (Canal France International) to strengthen journalists, fact-checking and the role of civil society as a bulwark.
Another example: the European program Africa-Europe Youth Academy (AEYA), which aims to strengthen youth leadership in 18 African countries. We fund associations, and collaborate with universities and schools to develop the skills and leadership of youth through training, mentoring, and spaces for dialogue, with a view, among other things, to guaranteeing better access to the job market.
Alain Boinet – Health is an important sector for Expertise France and you act even in a country at war like Ukraine. Concretely, what can you do in terms of health in this country.
Cassilde Brenière :
Health is a flagship sector for Expertise France in Ukraine. It is one of the 13 countries in which we have opened a country office, which is obviously not the case everywhere, since we cover nearly 150 countries.
Historically, we intervened via L’Initiative in support of the Ministry of Health and associations.
Since the outbreak of the war in 2022, we have developed and reoriented our programs to adapt our actions in a specific way to the urgent needs of reconstruction. We notably launched in January 2025 a program called REHAB, financed by the CDCS and AFD, to support Franco-Ukrainian hospital cooperation and the care of war amputees.
In connection with the AP-HP (public assistance – Paris Hospitals), French surgeons intervened to carry out maxillofacial surgery operations in connection with Ukrainian surgeons, a specialty that did not exist in Ukraine at the beginning of the conflict. In this regard we support the Superhumans center in Lviv and contributed to the launch of a second, in Odessa, whose opening is planned at the end of the first semester of this year.
The other major issue in the country concerns mental health. It will remain so even after the war. Expertise France supports the psychiatric hospital of Chernihiv via the APPUI Santé project, financed by the MEAE and the CDCS.
Alain Boinet – Access to water, sanitation and hygiene is a major issue that you hold particularly dear, as does AFD. The very strong demographic growth in Africa and the emergency, development, public health dimension of drinking water is a decisive issue among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals 2015-2030. How does Expertise France contribute to it.
Cassilde Brenière :
Climate change and its consequences (droughts, floods) require an urgent response. Our action in the water sector is multifaceted.
First, on integrated water resources management, we work with the OIEau in West Africa, in Latin America (Euroclima program) and in Georgia, both on good governance and on the valorization of watersheds.
Facing floods, we support the civil protection teams of partner countries in the drafting and updating of their prevention plans. The challenge is to ensure that in the event of an exceptional event, each of them can be organized to limit human impacts but also material ones. This work was carried out for 4 years with the teams of Beninese, Ivorian, Mauritanian, Togolese, Senegalese and Guinean firefighters.
Access to water services is also thought of in a Nexus emergency-development logic. We have for example worked in the east and north-east of Syria on the creation and management of water points, in direct link with local communities.
Finally, one of the axes of reflection concerns urban planning, at the heart of African cities which crystallize the challenges of the century (territorial planning – growing population). In this regard we carry out a very beautiful project with several cities in Ghana within the framework of the Sustainable Cities program.
Alain Boinet – Africa is a continent that experiences very strong demographic growth, which causes for these countries an immense challenge for the years and decades to come. Among all these countries, there is one which has a long-standing recurrent conflict while having an immense development potential for one of the most numerous populations of the continent, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Would you have an example of a project that you carry out in the DRC.
Cassilde Brenière :
The DRC is a major country for Expertise France. Around sixty collaborators work there within the Kinshasa country office.
Our action focuses notably on entrepreneurship. We have a support project for these driving forces called “Pour Elles”. It aims to support women, actors of the Congolese private sector, by financing training activities, by involving national incubators and by promoting female leadership in this job creation process. The aim is to boost the formal sector, because today, many of them suffer from an informal activity that limits their access to labor law.
Pour Elles also has a sports and cultural component. This project aims to bring out inspiring figures and to support a positive dynamic in the country through the practice of sport and the valorization of cultural and heritage riches.
Alain Boinet – Today, global migratory movements constitute a considerable issue, both for northern and southern countries and for public opinions and governments. What type of project do you develop in this field.
Cassilde Brenière :
Migrations concern both so-called Northern countries, and Southern ones. The majority of migrations are moreover between Southern countries, but they are perceived as an issue of domestic policy everywhere in the world.
We work on public migration policies along the entire chain by relying a lot on diasporas, which often have one foot “on both sides” and ultimately belong to both worlds.
When I speak of the entire chain I refer to the fight against human trafficking, the criminal chain, justice, the police and the care of migrants, but also the development of human capital and circular migrations.
The return of populations is therefore a crucial subject. In Morocco for example, the PRIM program supports sub-Saharan migrants and return migrants to facilitate access to rights, to social protection, and to economic integration but also diasporas that invest in their territories of origin.
We also develop circular migration programs, a subject of interest for many European countries whose demography is declining. With an impact notably in sectors such as agriculture, tourism, in connection with vocational training and supervised reception, to allow legal, protected and temporary migrations.
Our approach to migrations is accompanied by a mantra “triple win” : win for the country of origin, win for the migrant person, and win for France.
Alain Boinet – For crisis actors, notably humanitarians, what is called the Nexus, that is to say the coordination of emergency, development, even peace actions, is essential over time. How do you contribute to this process and what can be the role of the private sector as an actor of economic and social development.
Cassilde Brenière :
We seek to support countries in mobilizing their own domestic resources, in Palestine, we collaborate with the Ministry of Finance on resource mobilization, and on customs in order to be able to have sustainable local/national budgets. In Haiti, particular attention is paid to the fight against corruption and illicit trafficking thanks to the strengthening of customs services. In Senegal, on diverted assets that can be returned to the State, more than 50 million could be returned to it.
Concerning the private sector, one of our strategies, which is moreover the one carried by the European Union through what is called the Global Gateway, is to attract investments and mobilize private or local financing to finance development in a lasting way.
It is about creating the conditions for investment by the local private sector or the international and European private sector. This means working on a clear framework between the State, the private sector and the populations. This is what is called the enabling environment: making sure to create a regulatory framework, promoting the digitalization of services, and structuring the new commercial corridors.
On this subject of transfer corridors, the aim is to rethink paths, roads, and the approach to very constraining customs barriers between African countries. More intra-African trade is the guarantee of strong wealth creation and consolidated private investments.
Finally, there is another issue expressed by the private sector that I meet a lot when I go into the field: the need for manpower. There is an issue of vocational training and education. We are attentive to it, and support training institutes in sectors under strain (mines, digital), in order to create the conditions for sustainable investment.
Alain Boinet – You are a reader of Défis Humanitaires. What is for you its added value and what would you like to find more of in the new formula which will appear in the spring to adapt to the new context of geopolitical rupture and the fall of aid financing.
Cassilde Brenière :
First, I have a lot of regard for the humanitarian world. Even if we practice different professions and have sometimes occupied distinct postures, we are very complementary. The partnership between the State, its operators and French civil society is essential and we need civil societies to have a real impact.
We are today in a deeply transformed context, marked by a decrease in financing. This is no longer the world of before. This implies a renewal of technical cooperation, of France’s actions, but also of the humanitarian world.
What I particularly appreciate is the very practical character of the Défis humanitaires journal. Expertise France is also an operator, indeed we work on direct impacts, with concrete tools and experiences to share. There is also a challenge of convincing public opinion more and of showing shared interests.
We see it for example in hospital cooperation. During a recent event, Clotilde DURAND, Head of service, Deputy to the Director General of the Care Offer, Ministry of Health explained that she was often asked why cooperate with Ukraine while the French health system is under strain. Yet, shared interests are obvious, notably on questions of global health and pandemic. Expertise France worked with Guineans on the Ebola epidemic, which they managed to control: it was also in the interest of France.
These cooperations also enrich our professionals. Pneumologists from the AP-HP, engaged on a project in Rwanda, were confronted with clinical cases new to them and that made them progress.
It is important to show — notably through Défis Humanitaires — that these actions serve an objective of solidarity, a value that we defend, but that they also nourish France and strengthen shared interests.
In the current geopolitical context, marked by interdependence (global health, security, climate), we face global challenges that we will not be able to resolve alone.
Défis Humanitaires can highlight concrete, operational cases, which show how humanitarian action and technical cooperation benefit partner countries, beneficiaries, but also France and peace.
Alain Boinet –How would you like to conclude this interview ?
Cassilde Brenière :
I think that we are today at a real crossroads. Between humanitarian action and technical cooperation, there are many common points and we have every interest in sharing our experiences more. One of our specificities is to be a governmental agency and that is part of our identity. In the world that is opening before us, marked by more interdependence but also polarization, human ties are more essential than ever. They play a fundamental role.
For the future, I also believe that it is important to give a stronger role to Europe. We are a deeply European agency and that represents a real asset. Our models, our institutions and our values are levers on which we must rely to work together.
Working in partner countries is also co-constructing, learning from each other and progressing collectively. It is an immense richness.
Our exchanges with France Volontaires, for example, show that there still exist today in France many vocations among young people. These are forces that must be mobilized together.
I would therefore like to conclude on these very positive words, sincerely thanking you for this interview and for your commitment in the face of humanitarian challenges.
Agricultural engineer and of Rural Engineering of Waters and Forests, Cassilde Brenière has contributed for more than 25 years to the emergence of development models having concrete results on final beneficiaries.
After 15 years of experience in the private and associative sector, as a technical assistant among other things in Colombia, Burkina Faso, in the Philippines and in Romania then in charge of an operational unit for the operation of water and sanitation services serving 600,000 inhabitants in the suburbs of Paris, she joined the French Development Agency in 2009, as a project manager, before becoming head of the division in charge of all water and sanitation projects financed by AFD in the world.
In 2016, she expatriates to Morocco to become deputy director of the AFD agency in Rabat for 4 years where she supervised the teams of one of the largest AFD agencies and brought out new activities favorable to gender equality, a strong commitment of her entire professional and personal path.
She is then appointed deputy director of the Executive Operations Directorate of AFD in Paris in 2020 then deputy director general in charge of operations of Expertise France in 2023.
Since she joined AFD, Cassilde had at heart to contribute to the international debate on water and natural resources, climate in particular on adaptation, gender and their financing as well as to the evolution of AFD’s ways of doing on the strengthening of institutions, accountability and overall the posture of AFD as a donor.
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