After the last war the Office of Scientific and Technical Research Overseas (O.R.S.T.O.M.), an official French organisation in Paris, set up a network of polyvalent institutes and research centres in French-speaking Africa, in Madagascar, New Caledonia, Tahiti, and Guiana. At the same time it organised a number of centres for specialised training in tropical research to supply its overseas institutes with staff, and asked the university and the French technical services to pay their salaries. This was how the Institut d'études centrafricaines (I.E.C.) came to be set up in 1946, under the direction of Professor L. J. Trochain, its aim being to cover the whole of the former French Equatorial Africa.