This is a rich and original historical account of the operational activities of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), now France's main aid agency, in the former French colony of Côte d'Ivoire. The introduction sets out the book's main aim, namely to ‘bring together the elements required for a better understanding’ of AFD work overseas (p. 19). It then explains how this objective is to be achieved, specifically through archival research in Côte d'Ivoire and Paris, as well as extended interviews with expatriate and local AFD staff.

The main text itself is chronological and broken down into two parts. The first focuses on the emergence of a modern Ivoirian state and a formal French aid programme. Chapter 2 shows how the first colonial bank arose out of the need to compensate slave owners following the 1848 Abolition Decree and how the Banque de l'Afrique Occidentale subsequently helped France to enhance the ‘productive value’ of its African colonies. Chapter 3 traces the origins of the AFD back to London where the Caisse Centrale de la France Libre was born in 1941. It also identifies the April 1946 Law as the legislative basis on which post-war French economic assistance to Africa was subsequently built. The next chapter looks at the early post-colonial period (1960–78) during which the AFD funded investment projects and was associated with the ‘Ivorian miracle’, which saw annual economic growth of 7%, fuelled by strong commodity prices.

The second part focuses on the normalisation of the AFD's role alongside other donors. Chapters 5 and 6 home in on the introduction of World Bank-led structural adjustment and political conditionality in the 1980s and 1990s. They reveal how these approaches swept aside the AFD's earlier practices and placed the agency at odds with the Bank on market liberalisation. Chapter 7 explains the post-2002 crisis facing this war-torn West African country, while Chapter 8 looks at the resumption of development work and the re-emergence of France as the lead donor thanks to its huge debt-refinancing programme, the C2D. It ends by labelling the AFD the ‘doyen’ of development banks (p. 208) and attributing its longevity to its adaptability and its refusal to engage in clientelistic relations with African leaders, as per the so-called Françafrique.

This study has many strengths. First, it provides a long-run field-based analysis, which brings out the real-life challenges of working for an overseas development agency. In so doing, it reminds us that aid policy is ‘about interactions between people’ engaged in ‘a common adventure’ (p. 153). These individuals include unsung heroes such as the AFD's Joseph Flom, who devoted his career to the provision of affordable housing, and Yves Roland-Billecart, who acted behind-the-scenes to save Air Afrique from bankruptcy. Second, this study sheds new light on little-known AFD subsidiaries, such as CREDICODI, EECI and CAISTAB, which were active, respectively, in urban housing, electricity provision and commodity price stabilisation. A third highlight is the wide-ranging use of authentic materials such as photographs, oral testimonies, legislative extracts and explanatory text boxes, many of which offer potentially valuable teaching and training tools.

Written by the head of the AFD's history department, this study is inevitably practice-oriented and dispenses with the kind of detailed literature review and conceptual framework that are now de rigueur in academic monographs. While these omissions make sense, it is harder to justify the absence of a more systematic evaluation of French aid effectiveness. The book would no doubt have benefited from a more critical approach towards the failures of French aid policy, not least the misguided CIMAO regional concrete project of the mid-1970s, and the excessive use of debt-generating structural adjustment loans in the 1990s. These quibbles aside, this is an important study, which shows the value of retaining in-house expertise rather than relying, as the British government often does, on retiring senior officials to fill the historical gaps (see, for example Barrie Ireton's A History of DFID and Overseas Aid, Reference Ireton2013). It will be of value to Africanists, aid practitioners, historians and anyone looking to carve out a career in international development.