The huge French market for internationally mobile African students — and the desire for France to target even anglophone higher education markets in Africa — was showcased at an event in Paris.

While France is the third most popular destination after the US and the UK for all internationally mobile students, it’s by far the destination of choice for African students, taking in more than 92,000 or 26.5 percent of the total. Ninety-eight percent of the African students in France come from countries where French is spoken. For eight African countries starting with Algeria (85 percent), Madagascar (74 percent) and Senegal (67 percent), half or more of the mobile students opted for France.

For Rencontres Campus France 2016, therefore, held in Paris last November, the focus was firmly on sub-Saharan Africa. A number of African higher educational ministries and even individual universities were represented, along with Campus France staff from all over the world, African ambassadors to France and French ambassadors to francophone Africa.

The event was opened for the first time by the French minister for foreign affairs and international development, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who said France’s internationalisation strategy in higher education has to be “much stronger, more efficient and more effective”. He stressed that his country was “ready to participate in training the elite of tomorrow” but needed to streamline its visa policies and to “address the linguistic question” by offering more courses in English. He had himself visited both Kenya and Tanzania.

At a session later in the day, the French ambassador to Nigeria, Denys Gauer, offered another sign of a desire to win greater market share in anglophone Africa when he expressed his disappointment that such a small proportion of Nigerian students (419 in the academic year 2015-16) had chosen France. “There is a political goal to collaborate with the whole of Africa”, he added, “but that is not reflected at all in student flows”.