The field of development in general and international development organizations in particular cannot be conceived without translation. This explains the recent interest of researchers in these links between development and translation. However, the support of an international development organization for literary translation has not yet been studied extensively. The corpus of French-speaking African novels offers an interesting vantage point from which to analyze this question. This contribution shows how Oxfam Novib, by materially supporting the publication of some 250 novels between 1975 and 2020, actively contributed to the dissemination in the Dutch-speaking linguistic and cultural field of what was still called at the time the "literature of the South ". The study of their editorial activity, which spans almost 50 years and has been carried out in successive collaboration with seven different publishing houses, sheds light on the importance of this development aid NGO for the circulation of world literature.