France is a founding member of the Global Fund and is the largest European donors, and second largest public donor with a total contribution of € 5.44 billion to date. A January 2020 Report “France and the Global Fund” was developed outlining its priority areas of partnership and the important role that France plays in the Global Fund partnership.

Under the leadership of President Emmanuel Macron, donors at the Sixth Replenishment Conference in October 2019 in Lyon pledged more than US$ 14 billion making it the largest amount ever raised for a multilateral health organisation. At the conference, France pledged € 1.3 billion – a 20% increase from its previous contribution for the Fifth Replenishment. This pledge signalled the strong commitment that France has in global health, a priority of French development policy.

Since 2011, France has used part of its contribution to the Global Fund for the 5% Initiative, which mobilises technical expertise focused on the needs on the ground to bolster its support for French-speaking recipient countries and improve access to the funding from the Global Fund and their implementation.This initiative is managed by Expertise France, which has been hailed a success by all partners, seeing an increase in activity from 5% to 7% for 2017 – 2019, and 9% for the 2020 – 2022 cycle.  

In 2019, France renewed its commitment and increased France’s Global Fund contribution to Expertise France to 9% at € 3.88 million per year.

France has been a leader in global cooperation during the onset of COVID-19 which demonstrates its commitment towards global health and the values it defends: Human rights, gender equality, the fight against stigma and discrimination, as well as ensuring investments go towards community systems and community-led and -based organisations for community health workers as well as programmes for key populations. 

With health, education, and gender equality among the top five development priorities, France is committed to increasing its overall official development assistance to 0.55% by 2022 and to 0.7% by 2025, following the OECD recommendation.