What Francophonie is and how it works

An agency, then an organisation

Representatives of twenty-one states met at Niamey between 16 and 20 March 1970 and signed a convention creating the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique, an intergovernmental body for cultural and technical cooperation between countries that used French. Nothing in that instrument was called the Francophonie. The agency took the name in 1998, when it became the Agence intergouvernementale de la Francophonie, and the Charter adopted by the Ministerial Conference at Antananarivo on 23 November 2005 folded it into the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, with its seat at Paris. The anniversary of the Niamey signature is kept every year as the Journée internationale de la Francophonie.

The furniture

The Summit meets every two years and its formal name is the Conference of Heads of State and Government of Countries Having French in Common. It sat first at Versailles in 1986, then at Cotonou in 1995, Hanoi in 1997, Bucharest in 2006, Yerevan in 2018, Djerba in 2022, and Villers-Cotterêts and Paris in 2024. Between summits the Ministerial Conference of the Francophonie and the Permanent Council of the Francophonie carry the business. The post of Secretary General was created at Cotonou in 1995 and filled for the first time at Hanoi in 1997.

Two things sit beside the organisation rather than inside it. One is the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie, which the Charter recognises as the consultative assembly. The other is the set of four operators the Charter names: the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, the television channel TV5MONDE, the Université Senghor at Alexandria, and the Association internationale des maires francophones.

Admission does not turn on the language

The Summit decides admissions, and what it admits states to is a set of undertakings rather than a language policy. Read down the records and the point is plain. Catalan is the sole official language of Andorra, Greek of Greece, Armenian of Armenia, Bulgarian of Bulgaria, Albanian of Albania, Khmer of Cambodia, Lao of Laos and Vietnamese of Vietnam. Romanian is the official language of Romania and of Moldova. Arabic is official in Egypt, Mauritania and Tunisia, and in Morocco alongside Standard Moroccan Tamazight. Portuguese is official in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe. English is the official language of Dominica and of Saint Lucia. Every one of them is a full member.

The organisation also keeps two categories below full membership, associate member and observer, which carry no part in the decisions a member takes. Only full member states are filed here.

Members that are not states

The Charter admits governments as well as states, which is why the organisation's own list is longer than any catalogue of countries can be. Canada sits as a member, and so do Québec, New Brunswick and the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles in their own right; Ontario and Nova Scotia sit as observers. A subnational government with a seat at the Summit has no page on this site, so the roster on this page counts the member states and stops.

What a seat can cost

The Bamako Declaration, adopted on 3 November 2000, is the instrument that gives the arrangement teeth. It declares that the Francophonie and democracy are inseparable, and its fifth chapter sets out a graded response to a rupture of democratic legality that runs as far as suspension from the institutions of the Francophonie.

It has been used. Suspension followed the military takeovers in Mali on 18 August 2020, in Guinea on 5 September 2021, in Burkina Faso on 24 January 2022 and in Niger on 26 July 2023. Guinea was readmitted in 2024. After the takeover in Gabon of 30 August 2023 the Permanent Council went the other way and decided on 8 February 2024 against suspending it, while asking the transitional authorities to carry on with the process they had begun.

The exits of 2025

Niger and Burkina Faso announced their withdrawal on 17 March 2025 and Mali on 18 March 2025. The joint reasoning was that the organisation had come to act as a political instrument steered from Paris, and that suspension had been applied to some members and not others. All three had signed at Niamey in 1970.

Each had already moved French out of the slot the constitution reserves for an official language. Mali's constitution of 22 July 2023 makes the national languages official and leaves French as a working language. Burkina Faso's constitutional revision of 30 December 2023 does the same, with French and English as working languages. Niger's Charte de la refondation of 26 March 2025 makes Hausa the national language and English and French working languages. The country records here follow those texts, which is why Bissa, Dioula and Mooré stand in the Burkinabe language field and Hausa in the Nigerien one.

The roster on this page is generated from the country records rather than from the list the organisation publishes, so it moves when the records move rather than on the day an announcement is made. What is recorded here is the announcement and its date, and nothing about where the argument lands.