Egypt is getting another EUR 2 mn from France to deepen French teaching in its public schools — a second phase of a teacher-training partnership that has already put thousands of teachers through certification and delivered a new national French curriculum. This phase adds a strengthened monitoring framework designed to track what the training means in the classroom.

Egypt and the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) signed the grant on 24 June 2026 to launch TrèFLE 2, aiming to reach 8k teachers and 1 mn+ students by 2028, according to a statement from AFD — part of a wider EUR 300 mn package marking 20 years of AFD-Egypt partnership.

BACKGROUND — TrèFLE launched in 2021, financed by an AFD grant and implemented by a consortium of French institutions — France Éducation International (FEI), the Institut français d’Égypte and Réseau Canopé — working with the Education Ministry under the “Education 2.0” reform agenda, according to FEI’s own account of the project.

It’s a capacity-building partnership rather than a school-funding scheme: the grant supports teacher training, trainer certification and the development of French curriculum and classroom materials for the Ministry, rather than disbursing money to individual schools.

AFD and FEI both say the ambition at launch was to train 13k teachers and reach an estimated 3 mn students at the preparatory and secondary levels — targets built on Ministry enrollment statistics from the 2018-2019 school year. AFD Deputy Director Jérôme Taurand tells EnterpriseAM that “EUR 2 mn was disbursed” in the first phase.

Phase one trained more than 4k teachers and reached roughly 1 mn students at the preparatory level. The figures came in below the launch ambition — but AFD says the targets themselves moved. At the Ministry’s request, the program “progressively refocused its activities on the preparatory level,” Taurand says, after a reform reshaped where a second foreign language is taught in Egyptian public schools.

The shift followed an August 2024 decision by Education Minister Mohamed Abdel Latif to restructure the first preparatory year, confining the second foreign language to public and private language schools from the 2024/25 school year, according to Ahram Online; the same overhaul made the second foreign language pass/fail at the secondary level. TrèFLE now concentrates on the Official Language Schools, Distinguished Language Schools, Egyptian-Japanese Schools and National Schools where French remains on the timetable.

The clearest results are in teacher training. Roughly 500 French trainers went through the program, including 50 who received mobility placements in France; 99% of that cohort passed the DELF A2 certification and 91% passed DELF B1. The program also produced a new six-year French textbook series, “Ensemble, apprenons le français,” which AFD says will be extended to private schools as well.

What phase one didn’t publish is classroom-level outcome data — student proficiency gains, exam results or teacher retention — the kind of evidence phase two’s monitoring framework is built to generate. Asked about retention specifically, Taurand says it “is not a specific objective of the TrèFLE project and therefore does not fall within the project’s mandate to develop a dedicated retention strategy”; AFD points instead to sustainability mechanisms — a standing pool of certified trainers meant to keep developing teachers beyond the project, and support for the Ministry’s own institutional capacity.

Individual directorates offer glimpses of the program on the ground: the Minya Directorate of Education honored a French teacher at Reda Ashour Secondary School for Girls in Maghagha for reaching the advanced B2 level under TrèFLE.

What phase two adds

Both phases are structured as grants rather than loans, Taurand confirms; the second phase’s EUR 2 mn mirrors the first’s funding model.

The accountability tools are new. AFD says the first phase was externally evaluated, as the second will be, and phase two adds an annual Monitoring and Evaluation Committee that includes Egyptian academics specializing in pedagogy and language. It will also run start-and-end language-positioning tests for teachers and track French enrollment trends and student participation in national French competitions and certification exams. AFD hasn’t published the phase-one evaluation, but the new framework is designed to make phase two’s results more visible.

AFD frames the wider payoff in terms of employability. Taurand describes French as “a lever to enhance employability,” pointing to French service companies — Atos, Teleperformance, Orange — expanding in Egypt and needing multilingual staff, and noting the Francophone world accounts for roughly 16% of global GDP.

The labor-market logic has support, if not yet hard local data. “Those with knowledge of foreign languages can earn multiples of the salaries earned by those with only Arabic in call centers, customer support and technical support jobs,” University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs Professor Ragui Assaad tells EnterpriseAM — though he notes the specific evidence tying French to wages in Egypt is thin, and frames the case as sitting closer to long-term employability than to a measured short-term return.

The program’s success will ride on the wider school system, where the government is working through long-standing pressures on pay, class sizes and staffing. “The successful implementation of the program in public schools will of course depend on the availability of qualified teachers, which is not a given,” Assaad says. “There are no silver bullets.”

On pay, the government added a monthly teaching incentive of EGP 1k on top of the new EGP 8k public-sector minimum wage in the FY2026/27 budget, Finance Minister Ahmed Kouchouk says — putting an entry-level teacher’s floor at EGP 9k/month, with a further EGP 2k “excellence incentive” for top-performing school administrations. It’s a floor that leaves little room once essentials are covered, with education costs up 18.7% y-o-y in July, per CAPMAS.

On staffing, the government’s National Narrative for Comprehensive Development targets a 20:1 student-teacher ratio by 2030, down from 29:1, and 30 students per class, down from 40 — leaning on 167k new contract-teacher hires and a per-lesson rate rise from EGP 20 to EGP 50 to help close a gap left by 127k teachers Egypt lost between 2018 and 2023, as we reported in March.

AFD now puts the program’s potential reach at roughly 9k French teachers and 1.8 mn students across the preparatory and secondary levels — a figure it says was revised upward on the Ministry’s 2025-26 enrollment statistics, and larger than the 8k teachers and 1 mn+ students in phase two’s public announcement.

OUR TAKE — The foundation is built: thousands of teachers trained, trainers certified and a new curriculum in place. Phase two’s real test is measurement — the new monitoring committee, the external evaluation and the positioning tests are the tools to show what the training means for students, and publishing that data is what will let the partnership prove its return. That’s the number worth watching over the next two years.

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