The challenge is to convince our audiences that French is a language of the future, that the Institut français is a partner for the future.

What do your day-to-day missions involve, and what's your motivation for taking part?

Isaline: My daily missions are centered around the revival of the Language Center, which is losing momentum. Our priority is to provide pedagogical support for the teachers at the Institut français de Djibouti, as well as for the teachers of and French present in the country. There is a huge need for training, since French is the language of instruction, and teachers' qualifications are increasingly low.

What motivated me to take part in a Volontariat International was the discovery of new missions, a new country, as well as the issues involved in international educational cooperation.

Romuald: The heart of my mission is to coordinate the network of Language Centers, projects and actions, with the teams, with the aim of developing the activity of courses and certifications of the French Institute of Morocco. Our network comprises twelve branches. Some Language Centers are big machines, while others are smaller structures. Despite this heterogeneity, we aim to carry out actions in a mutualized way to optimize their impact. The aim is to turn our network into a strength.

What motivates me every day is the human and professional adventure. Human adventure because it's as a team that we can lead our projects, with a strategic end in mind. And it's a pleasure to work with the IFM teams, who are great to work with! It's a professional adventure because, when you're driving a project, you want to go in a straight upward line, from the starting point to the destination. But it's rarely like that! Every project is an adventure. And each project is a piece of a puzzle, which has to make sense and be chiseled out, so that it takes its place in the implementation of the overall strategy. It's also this dynamic, this constant reflection that's highly motivating.

In Djibouti, French is the language of education, but it's not spoken on a daily basis in family homes.

What major challenge(s) are you currently facing to promote and develop the French language in your country of practice?

Isaline: The main challenge is raising awareness of the training needs of teachers. Work also needs to be done to make learners aware of the level expected for the DELF - Diplôme d'Études en Langue Française - and DALF - Diplôme Approfondi en Langue Française - certifications. The exam failure rate is quite high.

The other major challenge is to cover the learning needs of the foreign population present - particularly the military - so that they can communicate with the locals. The challenge is to win the loyalty of representatives, so that training courses can be offered on military bases over the long term. This is an audience present for short periods - three to six months - so it's important to make training cycles permanent.

Romuald: The first challenge is to know how to select our challenges. We have to prioritize our missions, because we can't work on everything despite our motivation and enthusiasm. It's also important to unite everyone around common goals. Of the twelve people in charge of the Language Centers, the desires and realities on the ground are sometimes very different. Another major internal challenge is networking to maximize the impact of our actions. Everything works better if we're coordinated and move forward together. Externally, the challenge is to convince our audiences, as well as those who are not yet our audiences, that French is a language of the future, that the Institut français is a partner for the future.

The fundamental strategic challenge is to move from a receptive logic - where the public came to see us without us making any great efforts in terms of attractiveness -, to a logic of conquest. This is a fairly recent development for IF Maroc. It's changing the way we work, our angles of approach, and this change needs to take place both in the organization of our services and in individual professional practices, across the entire IFM network.

Since September 2023, we have launched a digital communications strategy concerning the activities of our language centers.

Could you share with us a project spurred or in the process of being developed to enhance the language's appeal?

Isaline: Ten days after my arrival, I set up the "Sport and Language" project with the Cooperation and Cultural Action Advisor(COCAC), in resonance with the 2024 Olympic Games. Our aim was to work more closely with local educational institutions to encourage children to love French. In Djibouti, French is the language of education, but it's not spoken on a daily basis in family homes. We wanted to show that it could go beyond the classroom, that you could also have fun in French.

So we built a sports commentator project, which was supported by the Fonds Langue Française 2024 - Appel à projets piloted by the Institut français Paris. We offered workshops on writing sports press articles and creating around the values of Olympism.

We carry this project as a witness of something that can be bigger and, why not, perpetuated with the support of local authorities. It's an open door to strengthen our ties.

Romuald: Since September 2023, we have launched a digital communications strategy concerning the activities of our language centers, with operational implementation. To do this, we have called on an external service provider, whom we have got to know, and who is also getting to know us: our offer, our business, the essentials of our missions. Our world is often a bit foreign to local communications agencies, which are used to providing services to companies in the more traditional fields of product sales. Our product is training. It's a specific, high-quality product that engages people over the long term. These can be real life projects when students undergo language training to be able to continue their studies in France or in a French-speaking country.

Concretely, in terms of performance on the network, this strategy has enabled us to gain nearly ten thousand subscribers on our social networks in four months, who have therefore entered our sales tunnel. Almost every one of our posts creates a link to our website, which has had to become a merchant, which it wasn't before. We therefore redesigned our course and certification pages to simplify navigation and the act of buying. Today, we're happy with the structure of our pages. But we still have a lot of work to do to improve online conversion: for certifications we're fine, for courses we're much better than before, but we still have some way to go.

Everything we put in place is done with a view to continuous improvement. And even if we'd like to be able to move faster -on this project specifically or others-, our subjects are numerous: some projects punctually take priority over others...

I was really struck by our visit to the permanent exhibition at the Cité internationale de Villers-Cotterêts. I think there's a bit of genius in the heads of the curators who created this exhibition.

What have you gained from taking part in the French Language 2024 Seminar?

Isaline:

Being a Volontariat International, this is my first opportunity to take part in the French Language Seminar. What motivated me to apply was the prospect of obtaining more tools to strengthen cooperation with MENFOP - Djibouti's Ministry of Education. I also wanted to meet my colleagues, to feel that I'm not the only one carrying these issues.

I've learned a lot from these three days in Paris and Villers-Cotterêts. I'm leaving with the prospect of promoting the online resources made available by the Institut français to the teaching community.

Romuald:

This is the second or third time I've taken part in this format of meetings. Each time, I find it a real opportunity to exchange and share experiences and best practices with colleagues. The meetings are always very enriching. On a human level, it's also a pleasure to meet up with colleagues who have sometimes become friends and whom we haven't seen for a long time.

With regard to this edition, I was really struck by our visit to the permanent exhibition at the Cité internationale de la langue française. I think there's a bit of genius in the heads of the curators who created this exhibition. I was quite blown away. It's extremely stimulating. When we talk about thinking about how this exhibition is going to be able to spread throughout the network, it makes you want to be part of the team that's going to be scratching its head on this subject.