About

For seventeen years, I helped build and negotiate the rules of African trade.

My career was spent inside the institutions where those rules are made. Director of Foreign Trade of Senegal. Chief Negotiator for the country in the African Continental Free Trade Area. Then President of the Council of Ministers that launched the continental market itself.

I sat on the side of the table where investment frameworks are drawn, where contracts are approved or reconsidered, where the trade-offs that shape a country's economy are actually made. I came to know not only the rules, but the people who write them, and the way decisions are truly reached — which is rarely the way they are written down.

Over those years, I watched international firms and investors make important decisions on the strength of reports that missed exactly this. Reports written from a distance, reading the same public sources as everyone else, blind to the ground.

I founded Assomembodja & Associates to close that gap. To put a career's worth of access and understanding at the service of those who must decide whether to commit capital in West Africa — and who need to know what the reports won't tell them.

Our work is discreet by nature. We say little in public, and everything under a mutual confidentiality agreement. We never disclose our sources. And we do not sell off-the-shelf reports: each engagement begins with your question, and is built around it alone.

Assome Aminata Diatta
Founder — Assomembodja & Associates