OIF · Solidarité COVID

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked with the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie on two things at once. The first was a need the OIF already had: community management for a COVID-related project. The second did not exist until I proposed it.

Both ran through Arroz Con Pollo, the studio I co-founded with Nabil Nadifi, which carried the work as a studio production. The distinction between the two matters, because one answered a brief and the other created one.

Across the Francophonie, entrepreneurs were responding to the pandemic, some by raising awareness, others by building solutions related to COVID. They were among the most useful stories an institution like the OIF could tell at that moment, and they were scattered across dozens of countries with no shared stage.

I designed an interview series to give them one. Each episode was a conversation with one entrepreneur, written and edited into a short video capsule. The format had to work identically from one country to the next, because it would be made entirely at a distance, with no crew on either side of the screen.

The editorial angle was deliberately narrow: entrepreneurs, not commentators, and action on COVID, not opinion about it. That narrowness is what made 66 very different people belong to the same series.

I sold the series to the OIF through Damien Van Achter, who led the project. That step matters as much as the production. An idea becomes work only when an institution agrees to carry it and publish it under its own name.

The OIF had not commissioned an interview series. I conceived it, pitched it and turned it into a mandate. Getting there meant presenting an editorial product the institution could recognise as its own: on mission for the Francophonie, useful during the crisis, and feasible while nobody could move.

The series brought together 66 entrepreneurs from 48 countries of the Francophonie. Nobody could travel. Every interview happened remotely, in whatever room and on whatever connection the entrepreneur had during the pandemic.

The breadth was the editorial argument. The Francophonie spans several continents, and a series limited to a handful of countries would have told a smaller story than the institution's own. Forty-eight countries made the series a portrait of the Francophonie under pressure, not a sample of it.

I conducted the interviews, wrote the series, directed it and edited it. Arroz Con Pollo carried the production as a studio. Sixty-six conversations across that many time zones and national situations were an exercise in logistics as much as in editorial judgment: scheduling, preparing each guest, getting usable image and sound from a home setup, and holding one editorial line across very different stories.

The constraint shaped the form. A format built for remote capture under crisis conditions had to be simple enough to repeat sixty-six times and strong enough that each entrepreneur still came through as a person with a specific answer to a specific problem.

Alongside the series, I handled the community management the OIF needed for its COVID-related project. It was the part of the mandate that started from the institution's own request: keeping a credible, regular presence in front of its audience while the crisis was unfolding.

Doing both at once gave me a view from inside the institution's communication and from outside it, through the entrepreneurs it wanted to reach.

The interviews were published as video capsules. One of them, with Laurette Bira, sits on this record. Each capsule put a named entrepreneur, a country and a response to the pandemic in front of the Francophonie's audience.

The discipline behind the format came from La Minute Créative, the short film series I had created within my UNIDO mission in Marrakech: one person, what they do and why it matters, told briefly and in a form that can be repeated. The OIF series applied the same discipline to a crisis and to an entire linguistic space, with the camera replaced by a video call.

For the OIF, the result was a body of first-hand testimony from 48 countries, gathered when travel and film crews were out of the question. For me, it was proof that an idea brought to an institution, rather than requested by it, can become an institutional publication.