[citation needed] His first African assignments for Radio France International took him to Mali and Somalia before being named at 27 as Abidjan staff bureau chief for RFI.
[5] From 1995 Ivory Coast's boycotted election of Henri Konan Bédié, the arrival of the mercenaries Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone to the April 1996 street fighting in Liberia's capital Monrovia and Jerry Rawlings' re-election in Ghana 1996, Picard covered the entire region[6] with several trips to Nigeria including the 1997 funeral in Lagos of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti.
[3] His panels bring together different perspectives on topics of the day[11][12] such as the 2015 Paris Climate Change Summit, Algeria's pro-democracy movement[13] and the migrant crisis.
[14] Interviews have included Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari who told Picard that he wanted to negotiate with Boko Haram for the release of the 219 kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls.
[16][17][18] On Fridays, he hosts the journalists' roundtable The World This Week which was first launched in partnership with the International Herald Tribune and then The Daily Beast with foreign editor Christopher Dickey as regular panellist until his death in July 2020.