ABSTRACT
Two features appear to characterize French development assistance: organizational complexity and a relatively unchanging program. On the organizational side, French assistance is administered by a bewildering variety of ministries and agencies with apparently little central coordination. But despite such organizational ambiguity, fairly clear-cut and unchanging objectives and procedures do seem to exist, at least implicitly, which seem to have remained reasonably constant since at least the early 1960s: assistance is provided on a relatively large scale; 1 assistance is largely focused on a limited number of countries, mostly in Africa, with which France considers itself to have a “special relationship;” and assistance programs maintain a strong emphasis on education and technical cooperation.
