Nogent-sur-Marne, 29 August 2019. Luc Arnaud was elected managing director of GRET by staff and administrators who are members of the association for a four-year mandate. He took up his functions following GRET’s General Assembly on 26 August. He will be backed in his mission by GRET’s new chairperson, Henry de Cazotte. Together, they will conduct a new stage of GRET’s activity.
Luc Arnaud, an agricultural techniques engineer from Bordeaux, has been working with GRET for almost 30 years. Since 2001, he held the position of GRET’s representative in Madagascar, a position he had previously held in Mauritania for ten years. Before joining the NGO, Luc Arnaud practised various professions:
teacher in an agricultural high school in Vendôme, volunteer for a development project in Somalia, and technical assistant for the German development cooperation agency in Sudan. Luc Arnaud became GRET’s managing director on 26 August 2019, and administrator of GRET’s Innovation for development endowment fund. He succeeds Olivier Bruyeron, GRET’s managing director since 2013, who had come to the end of his two 3-year mandates.
Asked about his vision for GRET between now and 2022, Luc Arnaud answered: “The sustainable development goals are an element of universal language within which GRET must conduct its action and its project, because they were accepted by all countries and can therefore be the basis of political advocacy and roll-out of actions. This is the world in which GRET aims to act, thanks to innovation, capitalisation and sharing of experiences, as well as a strong presence in the field. This is the world in which we are creators of “possibilities” for a sustainable world with less inequalities”.
GRET has a strong specificity: it is the members of the association who take important decisions at the General Assembly, define orientations and elect their director. The latter is now elected for four years, with a maximum of two mandates. The Management Board (MB) is made up of staff representatives and prominent figures who are specialised in the area of development and international cooperation. Pierre Jacquemot, former French ambassador in three African countries, researcher at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, and current chairperson of Groupe initiatives, had held this role since 2012. Henry de Cazotte, appointed new chairperson by the MB and confirmed by the General Assembly on 26 August, will take over this role for a four-year renewable mandate.
An agronomist who graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the ESSEC Business School in France, Henry de Cazotte retired from the Agence française de développement in 2017, where he held several management positions. In recent years, he had worked on the coordination of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable development (Rio+20), as inter-ministerial coordinator for the post-2015 development agenda negotiations and the Sustainable development goals, the Addis-Ababa Conference on Financing for Development, and he was the special representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development for the Habitat III conference. He is the author of the report entitled “Seeking Agreement on Official Development Assistance” (AFD, 2018), which paves the way for national agreement in France on development assistance.
Press contact:
Claire Labat, Tel. +33 (0)1 70 91 92 76 / +33 (0)6 06 61 74 22, labat@GRET.org
Founded in 1976, GRET is an international development NGO which acts both in the field and at political level to provide sustainable innovative responses to the challenges of poverty and inequalities. Every year, its teams implement almost 200 projects, studies and consulting missions in approximately twenty countries in Africa, Asia and Haiti.
