Who Really Makes Money in Francophone Africa Now?

Every few months someone sends me that 2017 article — “how much money does France make in French-speaking Africa?” — as if it settled the matter. It was good journalism. It is now a period piece. Because between 2022 and 2026, the ground moved under all four of its pillars. Let me walk you across the terrain as it actually is.

The troops left — physically, and fast

The most visible pillar was military, and it has essentially been dismantled in West Africa. France exited Mali in 2022, Burkina Faso in 2023, Niger in 2024. Then 2025 finished it: the Chad air base was handed back at the end of January; on 20 February France returned its only base in Côte d’Ivoire — the 43rd BIMA — now renamed Camp Thomas d’Aquin Ouattara; and later in the year France handed Senegal back Camp Geille and the Dakar airfield, ending 65 years of presence. By the close of 2025, France had fewer than 2,000 troops left on the continent, concentrated in Djibouti and Gabon. The garrison that underwrote “Françafrique” is, on the West African map, gone.

The currency grip loosened — though not fully

The second pillar was the CFA franc. Here honesty cuts both ways. The grip is real and it loosened: since the 2019 reform, France no longer sits in the governing bodies of the BCEAO, and WAEMU states no longer park half their reserves at the French Treasury. The long-promised renaming to the eco is now pencilled in for around 2027. But do not oversell it either — the eco is still designed as a euro-pegged, fixed-rate currency with France as guarantor, and as of 2025 it remains more announcement than instrument. Call it what it is: the leash is longer, not cut.

The trade crown passed to Beijing

This is the pillar the old essay could not have foreseen, and it is the one that matters most to a business. In 2024, for the first time, China overtook France as Senegal’s top trading partner — Chinese imports rose about 8% to roughly €1.3bn while French imports fell 17% to about €1.1bn. Cameroon tells the same story; China has been Africa’s largest trading partner for sixteen straight years, at a record ~$295bn in 2024. And in 2025 Beijing moved from trade leader to rule-setter: China extended zero-tariff treatment to 100% of tariff lines for all 53 African countries it has diplomatic ties with — unilaterally, with no reciprocity — under its new China–Africa Economic Partnership for Shared Development (least-developed countries from December 2024, all 53 from mid-2025, in force 2026). Every Francophone market can now ship to the Chinese market duty-free — a door the EU still hedges with conditions and reciprocal opening. France’s exclusive commercial pre-eminence in its former colonies is simply over. The money question no longer has a single European answer.

And Africans are redrawing the map themselves

The fourth shift is the one least visible from a Paris or London desk: the region is re-architecting itself from the inside. In January 2025 the Alliance of Sahel States — Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger — formally left ECOWAS, launched a joint passport and force, and imposed a 0.5% levy on goods entering the bloc from outside. Corridors are being redrawn; Lomé and Cotonou rise as new axes. Whatever one thinks of it, the point for an entrant is structural: the rule-makers are increasingly African, not external, and they are not all pulling in the same direction.

So who makes the money now?

Not one capital. The honest 2026 answer is plural: Chinese financiers and contractors; local and pan-African champions who own distribution the incumbents never had; the Gulf and Turkey, arriving with capital and without the colonial baggage; and increasingly whoever controls the digital payment rails, because value here now moves on mobile money that routes around the franc entirely. The clearest face of the pan-African force is Aliko Dangote: in June and July 2026 alone his group unveiled a $46bn expansion targeting 2.1 million barrels a day of refining across Nigeria and Kenya, and an AFC-backed $7bn fertiliser build-out that triples Nigerian output and plants a new factory in Ethiopia — with Tanzania in talks. That is a Nigerian house industrialising the continent on its own account, at a scale no former coloniser is matching on the ground today. France still holds real cards — the euro guarantee, the language, deep corporate roots in energy and telecoms. But it holds them in a crowded room now, not an empty one.