On the occasion of the symposium "Investing in Development", let's carry on the discussion started in June.
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What is the impact of private sector activity in development?What should the public and private sectors' respective roles be?

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Last month, I spoke to a group of British parliamentarians who sit on something called the International Development Committee. Their role is to scrutinise the work of the Department for International Development. "DFID" - as it is known - is the arm of the British government concerned with promoting development, supporting the alleviation of poverty across the globe, and funding multilateral organisations like the UN World Food Programme.Members of the International Development Committee asked me to travel to London to speak to them as part of their inquiry into the work of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the support it receives from DFID. As part of the inquiry, an open invitation was issued to any organisation or individual with an interest in global food security to contribute written evidence.

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These few lines came to my mind after one of our Board of Directors' meetings devoted, among other things, to a new participation in an important microfinance institution in Morocco - a country famous for its involvement in the sector. I have, for a long time, been an avid supporter of microfinance. And I am particularly proud of the important increase in the amount of investments made in this sector by my organization, AFD, over the past 20 years: through 60 projects and nearly 300 million euros invested, we have helped more than 1.5 million people make their way out of poverty. We now want to go further, encouraged in this by GCAP's very positive evaluation of our involvement. I see microfinance as a powerful tool against exclusion; it allows people who have been traditionally excluded from the financial systems to have access to credit. Great tribute must be paid to the pioneers of this revolutionary approach.

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Having just returned from Senegal, I want to share my thoughts with you on an issue that became strikingly clear to me: the favorable perspectives shaping up for Africa's agriculture and their complex implications for future energy choices.

While traveling through the irrigated rice production area in the Senegal River Valley, you could see the new opportunities that rising world prices of agricultural commodities could bring to African agriculture. The changes in Senegal are down right impressive. To be sure, the dramatic upturn in world prices is spawning many challenges for net importers of agricultural commodities and for the World Food Program, as Josette Sheeran so emphatically points out in this blog. In addition, it is creating a fair amount of social and political tension in some urban areas. In order to be beneficial for all, this price surge must therefore incite cities to become better suppliers and service providers to their rural peripheries, so that cities also reap the benefits of improving conditions in rural areas. (I will come back to this fundamental relationship in another column.

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The fourth conference of francophone ministers of justice has just been held in Paris. One of the two themes was "justice and development" and notably economic law and control in French-speaking states.

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Is it fair to ask developing countries companies to follow the rules of Corporate Social Responsibility considering that our countries have developed themselves without such constraints? Would you consider CSR as a form of protectionism?

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Sorry that it has taken me a bit of a while to get back to you on the issue of Aid for Trade. I have just been able to sit down after a busy week discussing with WTO members and Heads of International Organisations on this topic.

It was never going to be easy to bring together the huge crowd that we saw in Geneva last week for our first Aid for Trade Global Review.

Bob Zoellick, from the World Bank; Dominique Strauss-Kahn, from the IMF; Kemal Dervis, from UNDP; Donald Kaberuka, from the African Development Bank; Luis Alberto Moreno, from the Inter-American Development Bank; and Rajat Nag, from the Asian Development Bank were all there. Luckily none of them missed their plane connections!

We also had with us Supachai Panitchpakdi of UNCTAD; Juan Somavia, of the ILO; Edouard Dayan, from the Universal Postal Union; Patricia Francis, from the ITC and Abdoulie Janneh, from the UNECA. Never has the WTO seen so many heads of international organizations gather at our headquarters for a conference like this! I guess it is a clear signal of the importance they - we - all attach to Aid for Trade.

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It is clear from the first interactions on this blog, that development is still above all considered from an economic point of view. Whether the discussions touch on the Millenium Goals, aid for trade, integration or the involvement of new players, the same implicit concerns prevail: production must be increased, exchanges must be intensified and, of course, the distribution of the ensuing wealth must be more equitable, since development is justified by the reduction of poverty.

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I come back from Kenya. AFD and other donors including the World Bank and EIB are financing a large-scale public geothermal investment program that will supply most of Kenya's future power generating capacity. The power generation mix that will fuel Kenya's rapidly growing economy over the next decade will be carbon-poor.

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