This text is part of the special Francophonie notebook
Occupying the second most important position within the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), Caroline St-Hilaire takes stock of an eventful first year, marked by administrative reforms and numerous missions abroad.
Caroline St-Hilaire arrived in Paris on the morning of April 4, 2023 to begin her duties as administrator of the OIF. At noon, she received the guidelines for her mandate from the secretary general, Rwandan Louise Mushikiwabo. A week later, here she is in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to visit the IX installationsare Francophonie Games. On October 7, she was staying in Lebanon at the time of the Hamas attacks against Israel.
And it is from Yaoundé, Cameroon, that she describes her first year in office. Its role consists of managing human resources and finances, as well as ensuring the implementation of programming in member countries. The general secretary also gave him the mandate to continue the decentralization initiated in 2019.
“Revising our financing formula represented one of the major projects of my first year,” she says. The scale of statutory contributions has not been increased since 2007.”
Members of the OIF agreed to correct this during the Ministerial Conference of La Francophonie in November 2023, in Yaoundé. This funding will have been increased by almost 7% in 2027, compared to 2023. It is mainly the contributions from countries in the South that are increasing. Those of Canada and France, which account for approximately 65% of total contributions, will remain stable.
Concrete repercussions
Caroline St-Hilaire contributed to the development of the OIF’s programming for the next three years. “The OIF often carried out more than 40 projects at the same time in past years, but now we decided to have fewer so that they would have more effect,” she says.
Among the twenty initiatives on the OIF’s menu, eight concern culture and education; five, democracy and governance; seven, sustainable development. This includes the La Francophonie avec les program, which aims to support women’s access to income-generating activities and economic opportunities. “When we help women, we also help their children and their families,” notes Caroline St-Hilaire.
Take care of human resources
The arrival of the administrator took place in a tense context due to a survey reporting a high proportion of OIF employees who said they were victims of moral, and even sexual, harassment, and whose results were made public.
The OIF has since adopted a new policy for preventing and combating harassment. “The policy does not simply describe what constitutes harassment and provide for sanctions,” emphasizes Caroline St-Hilaire. We put a lot of emphasis on training offered to managers and employees so that everyone is on the same page. »
Still on the human resources side, the personnel transfers which accompanied the decentralization of activities also caused certain challenges. The OIF would like more of its missions to now be piloted from local representations, rather than from Paris or Quebec. In several cases, this required relocation of project managers.
A summit on the horizon
The coming year does not look any quieter for the former federal deputy and former mayor of Longueuil. She will notably participate in two economic missions, in Romania and Quebec. “States and governments want the OIF to play an important role in the economic field, and this is also what emerged from recent consultations that the Secretary General carried out with the youth of the French-speaking world,” she explains. . Young people want the Francophonie to create wealth and have a concrete effect in their lives. »
France will also host the next Francophonie Summit, in October 2024, at the Château de Villers-Cotterêts, in Aisne. This symbolic place saw King Francis 1er sign, in 1539, an ordinance which imposed the use of French, to the detriment of Latin, in official acts, thus favoring the emergence of French as the national and diplomatic language of the country.
This first year changed Caroline St-Hilaire’s view of the OIF. “I was able to see with my own eyes how much the people who work there believe in their mission and how our projects change lives,” she says. I also note that the OIF plays a crucial role so that French continues to count in major multilateral meetings. »
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