On a sandy street in the bustling Cité Keur Gorgui, not far from the city centre of the Senegalese capital, the near-empty premises of the Dakar Institute of Technology (DIT) have a holiday feel to them on this day in mid-June 2025. Fatoumata Yarie Camara and Afdel Desmond Kombou are students here. They have come from Guinea and Cameroon to study at this university specialising in artificial intelligence and big data management.

For them, as for all young people dreaming of becoming developers, IT engineers or data scientists, the digital and new technologies sector offers a wealth of jobs and business opportunities in a market that is both hyper-competitive and highly selective. Crucial to economic transformation, the sector is in the process of expanding in Africa and is able to draw on an ever-larger, relatively young workforce that is keen to innovate.

Aside from motivation, these students also rely on the public and private investment needed to make the digital ecosystem truly attractive. Senegal has been positioning itself as a digital leader within West Africa for some time now, seeking to make it one of its flagship economic sectors, accounting for 10 to 15 per cent of its GDP. Its president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, elected in 2024, has proposed an ambitious new strategy, putting digital technology at the heart of development and sovereignty policies. According to the results of the digital diagnosis reported in the Technological New Deal (NDT) project, the country ranked 8th out of 50 in the digital industry within Africa and 11th out of 50 in terms of its internet performance.

The NDT, launched by the government in February 2025, has set four goals to be achieved by 2034: digital sovereignty (by creating a sovereign cloud, for example), the digitisation of public services, the development of the private digital economy (start-ups, fintech, etc.) and African leadership in research and logistics, through initiatives such as the creation of a specialised computing centre for artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Papa Fall, an artificial intelligence and big data engineer, we must hope that the Technological New Deal’s ambitious goals are not thwarted by “the complexities of Senegal’s administrative bureaucracy” and that the results hoped for are not just a pipe dream.

“With more than a trillion CFA francs (over €1.5 billion) in planned investments across 12 flagship programmes and 50 projects covering all sectors ranging from digitisation to telemedicine, artificial intelligence, space and satellite technology, and so on, I believe the Technological New Deal will contribute to the rise of a new Senegal under the impetus of new political, entrepreneurial and digital leaders,” says Fall.

“Huge need for training”

As part of this digital and technological strategy promoted by the Senegalese authorities, DIT is welcoming students from 18 different countries, hoping to provide them with the skills they need to succeed on the job market. Its director general, Dr Nicolas Poussielgue, underlines the “huge need for training”, which must be linked to the needs of businesses, to facilitate and boost recruitment.

“When students are skilled and ready for work following their training, they have more opportunities to find a job and join the labour market,” he notes.

Afdel Desmond Kombou, who was already working during the day, benefited from a recommendation to do further studies in artificial intelligence in the evenings. He would like to go on to set up his own business, developing applications, for example. Based on Senegal’s current strengths and its prospects for the future, this young man from Cameroon is keen to try his luck in this country. “If you want to survive in this environment, you either emigrate or create your own job,” he says confidently.

Fatoumata Yarie Camara, who completed a literary baccalaureate at a French secondary school in Conakry, has not yet made a definitive choice about her career path. She is currently specialising in big data management. She is still hesitating between freelancing and salaried employment. “Going back to my country, joining the public sector and being a tech pioneer, that’s no small thing,” she says.

Poussielgue acknowledges the challenges: “Young graduates really struggle to enter the labour market. At the same time, companies complain that they can’t always find the people with the profiles they need to grow. This is often because of the mismatch between the content of the training available and the needs of those recruiting staff.”

A former civil servant at the French Embassy in Senegal, then head of doctoral training and research at Campus France Paris, the DIT’s director general is convinced that “when skills are proven, opportunities exist”. He nonetheless highlights the need for more support from the Senegalese state in terms of the school-business alternance system. While the Fund for Financing Vocational and Technical Training (3FPT) does support students up to bachelor’s degree level by taking care of their tuition fees, it is not sufficient to meet the needs and demand.

For engineer Fall, jobs in the digital sector can only be created on a large scale by the private sector and through business initiatives. “It isn’t about application-oriented digital technology [technology that creates software] but digital technology that creates electronic equipment [hardware]. Because it is these electronics factories that will generate massive job opportunities.”

This ambition requires faster development, nationally, of practical and technical training programmes as well as the more advanced skills taught at the world’s leading universities. “Senegalese universities are not lagging behind in these subjects, but we now need to integrate them more widely into our national curricula,” he says. At the same time, support must be given to the creation and development of start-ups and fintech [digital financial services] in all sectors, to support “Senegal’s young people, who are very open to digital technology”, given the very high demand for this type of service, as everywhere on the continent.

Supporting the next generation’s skills development

Digital strategy and artificial intelligence consultant Aboubacar Sadikh Ndiaye also subscribes to this approach to excellence, whereby “training provision must be determined by current and future market needs”. With Senegal still being “an informal economy with a young and enterprising population”, this expert advocates the well-managed development of “interdisciplinary courses combining technical/IT skills with soft skills, incorporating an entrepreneurial dimension from the very start of the training process”.

Enough studies, he says, now show that “by 2030, the most sought-after skills around the world will be those emerging around IT, coding and artificial intelligence”, much more so than management skills. “Universities and higher education institutions should focus their programmes on these top priority and emerging technical skills,” adds the former Sciences Po Paris lecturer.

Papa Fall cites ESP Dakar, the Faculty of Science and Technology at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, the Dakar Institute of Technology (DIT), and Cheikh Hamidou Kane National University (formerly the Virtual University of Senegal) as models to be supported for their performance in terms of “highly practical training programmes in step with AI”. Students must be helped with “access to open source platforms, paid artificial intelligence tools, physical servers and other related items”, he adds. “This is what will enable them to produce more relevant applications.”

Another approach to supporting the sector, emphasised by Sadikh Ndiaye, would be to create incubators covering all fields within higher education institutions to encourage students and recent graduates to “transform their innovative ideas into viable projects”, in what would be “the first link in the entrepreneurial chain”.

Similarly, Mouhamadou Lamine Badji, general secretary of the SYTS union representing workers at Sonatel, advises schools to include “lots of maths” in the training they provide to young people. “Senegal is currently in the prehistoric era of digital technology, although there are individuals who stand out globally in this sector,” he says, contrasting with the other views expressed. “We consume more technology than we design, despite the inventiveness of our young people and the current entrepreneurial dynamic. It will take a great deal of time and effort to catch up, taking inspiration from models such as China, Singapore and the United States.”

Sonatel is the longstanding national telecoms operator in which the French group Orange is a majority shareholder alongside the Senegalese state. Its activities have a profound impact on the digital and new technology sector. The group is a major provider of direct and indirect employment.

The burning issue of investing in the future

Projects aimed at mass job creation, especially for the young, are at the centre of the colossal investments envisaged under the Technological New Deal. The goal to train 100,000 digital graduates and create 100,000 direct and 200,000 indirect jobs are among the key targets of the NDT for 2034. In addition, the labelling of 500 tech start-ups should help create a nationwide network enabling new opportunities to be seized in Africa and around the world.

Fall sets out one prerequisite: “Without credible and committed investors who are prepared to make huge investments on a par with the political ambitions, we will not be able to build a strong digital sector, like in the United States or elsewhere.”

The construction of the Digital Technology Park (PTN) in Diamniadio and operational or soon-to-be-operational data centres, all largely financed by private investors and local development banks, is an important step towards achieving the stated objectives, underlines Fall, who is also the founder of PAFIA, a Senegalese start-up specialising in artificial intelligence in project management, monitoring and evaluation.

“But it is not a good idea for the state to take on all the tech initiatives itself. The best approach would be to give Senegalese start-ups the opportunity to manage part of the market, such as digitalisation in healthcare and education. This already exists with fintech companies such as Wave, InTouch, Orange Money and, more recently, Djamo. It is with models such as these that we will be able to develop these sectors.

Ensuring decent employment

Creating jobs on a massive scale is one thing, but ensuring that these jobs offer decent pay and working conditions is another. Lamine Badji of the SYTS is also coordinator of the national inter-union group for the telecommunications sector. For him, the current situation in Senegal shows “the full complexity of digital technology, with the constant emergence of new jobs, such as online sales or app-based delivery services using motorcycles known as Tiak-Tiak.

To defend the interests of these workers, who are not always formally employed, the SYTS is working to establish a specific collective agreement for the digital industry. “In this sector, there are prosperous companies that align their employees with the agreement for the commercial sector, which allows them to pay them poorly,” says the union representative.

In her workshop-boutique in the residential neighbourhood of Sacré-Cœur 3 in Dakar, Aïcha Guissé aspires to make a living from her passion. In late 2022, this independent, 26-year-old woman with diplomas from Senegal and France founded Solü, a clothing brand for men and women designed and manufactured with an African touch. She sells her collections directly on Instagram and WhatsApp using QR code payments. This means spending several hours a day communicating via digital messaging with a demanding clientele that likes to communicate, as well as with local ‘Tiak-Tiak’ and international couriers who deliver her parcels via GP collaborative services. For her, digital technologies are a must.

“The difficulty is managing everything. We have to monitor our platform pages, keep an eye on orders, stock levels and order tracking. This means we have to be active and available at all times,” explains the entrepreneur. Despite her commitment and strong work ethic, the young woman says she is holding on to her salaried job as an administrative employee in higher education for now, as she is unable to make a decent living from her work as a designer.

“There are entrepreneurs and self-employed workers who, from our perspective as trade unionists, could be classed as workers. These are young people who are highly inventive and innovative. But they lack support, particularly in terms of social security. This makes their situation rather precarious,” says Lamine Badji. In his view, there is an urgent need to regulate the effervescence in this ecosystem: “We support them, through unionisation, the formalisation of their businesses and personal situations, and by offering practical advice.”

Inter-union coordination is being established to help thousands of young self-employed entrepreneurs, such as Aïcha, or employees, with the ultimate goal of securing a sectoral agreement that would, for example, harmonise wages. “This agreement would also protect them against unfair dismissal or social dumping that would drag everyone down in a race to the bottom,” argues the leader of the SYTS, a union affiliated to the CNTS, the country’s largest trade union confederation.

Paying to innovate

Expert Sadikh Ndiaye is calling on the Senegalese authorities to draw inspiration from the Moroccan experience, launched ten years ago: massive, targeted and consistent investment in training thousands of high-level engineers capable of “designing and coding”.

“This strategy is now yielding results: Elon Musk’s Starlink and SpaceX are setting up operations in Morocco,” he explains, “Not to exploit cheap labour but because they can find engineers there who are capable of understanding their complex technologies and developing innovative solutions, rather than just executing orders,” says the author of a book on the language of digital transformation, Langage de la transformation digitale.

“Senegal must pay to innovate,” warns Lamine Badji. “Digital technology today is like electricity during the Second Industrial Revolution: countries that lag behind in this area are doomed to live on the margins of the global economy.”

This article has been translated from French.

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