Thiès, Senegal – The Ministry of Economy, Planning and Cooperation in Senegal, through its Directorate of Planning, hosted a workshop to develop several public investment projects from 8 to 13 September 2025. The Ministry, along with the Ministry of Family and Solidarity and the Ministry of Agriculture worked on refining and finalizing the design of major public investment projects they are leading, with a view to facilitating inter-ministerial endorsement and future inclusion in the finance bill after a positive final evaluation. Five major strategic projects for Senegal's development were discussed at a technical level, that focus on:
- Improving access to isolated border zones
- Rural electrification
- Mechanization of agriculture
- Developing agricultural cooperatives
- Expanding universal health coverage (Couverture Maladie Universelle, CMU)
The ILO, as part of the Global Accelerator, supported this workshop, helping project leaders from the government to take into account the priorities of the national Global Accelerator roadmap and to embrace its logic to systematically promote decent employment and universal social protection. While the government routinely undertakes this exercise, the involvement of the Global Accelerator team helped frame it around the integration of public social protection, skills development, employment and other social policies.
Discussions between the various project leaders, specialists invited from other ministries, such as vocational training, to provide technical support, and ILO experts helped guide the drafting of the projects towards maximizing their social, economic and ecological impact. The Global Accelerator team supported the project leaders in understanding the broad scope of employment and social protection issues and the public programmes that they can leverage. The exchanges on employment-intensive activities like road access and electrification were highly productive as these activities typically generate incomes, improve livelihoods and facilitate access to basic services, but are not always linked with employment, training and social protection national priorities. This helped project developers rethink how the coherence and impact of their projects can be improved and even practically implemented.
The issues of employment and access to social protection, as well as major transitions (digital, ecological, demographic and formalization of the economy), were thus addressed in the various projects presented and ‘matured’.
The workshop represents a new decisive step in Senegal's integration into the Global Accelerator initiative. It demonstrates the strong convergence between the vision of the initiative and that of the country, and a clear desire to make decent employment and social protection cross-cutting issues in all public policies and strategic investments that support its development. It reflected the concern of the Senegalese authorities, relayed by the Directorate of Planning, to introduce an integrated approach from the project development phase onwards in order to ensure a coherent and efficient development trajectory for the country.
The ILO will continue to support this project within the framework of the Global Accelerator, capitalizing on the feedback from this workshop to help improve the DGPPE's maturation guide, which is currently under review, with a view to strengthening the integrated nature of the process.