By Assome Aminata Diatta, former Minister of Trade and SMEs of Senegal
For a long time I wondered why we seemed surprised that our country remains poor, that unemployment is endemic, and that a large share of our young people would rather join the civil service than start a business.
The answer may lie in an observation I made, department after department, during my years at the ministry. You will always find the trade services. The labour inspectorate. The tax services. You will almost never find the department responsible for small and medium-sized enterprises, a branch of the SME development agency, or any representation of the chamber of commerce.
In other words, the State is present wherever it inspects, and absent where it should support. An entrepreneur in Kolda or Tambacounda knows the face of the official who checks. They do not know the face of the official who advises.
This finding is documented, and it has not changed
The observation is far from original, and that is precisely what should alarm us. The socio-economic diagnosis of the Plan Sénégal Émergent attributes the weak contribution of the domestic private sector to gross domestic product to the inadequate coordination of support measures and technical assistance to businesses, and to SMEs in particular.
A study commissioned in 2017 by the Directorate of External Trade, within the ministry responsible for trade and SMEs, goes further, and its findings are severe. Over fifteen years, the State created some ten SME support bodies. They report to different ministries: Economy and Finance, Trade, Industry. Their activities overlap considerably, and to these are added donor-funded projects that operate autonomously for as long as their funding lasts.
The study’s conclusion deserves to be quoted as it stands: the proliferation of support institutions creates a degree of confusion for SME owners, and often a deterrent effect, given the differing procedures they must follow depending on which body they approach.
There lies the Senegalese paradox in a single sentence: we do not have a shortage of institutions, we have a shortage of presence. Some ten support bodies, almost all in Dakar, and an entrepreneur in Kolda who encounters none of them. The Dakar entrepreneur, for their part, gets lost among them. In both cases, support fails to reach its target.
The study made two recommendations. Bring these bodies together in a single place, a one-stop shop or a business centre, where an SME would find all its counterparts. And carry out a genuine review of the system, to identify not only overlapping mandates but also, in its own words, the areas where no support exists at all. That was nearly ten years ago.
What this produces, in practice
It is worth measuring what this asymmetry means for a small business. An entrepreneur’s first contact with the State is almost always an inspection, rarely a piece of advice. They discover their obligations at the moment they are reproached for not having met them. They learn that a procedure exists on the day its absence costs them.
This produces two effects, and each reinforces the other. First, lasting mistrust: the administration becomes a risk to avoid rather than a resource to draw on, which pushes towards informality rather than formalisation. Second, waste: support schemes exist, financing is available, public contracts are open, but the firm that could benefit does not know they exist, for want of a counterpart within reach.
What can be expected of a country that sends its administration to hunt down breaches and collect tax, without ever sending the one that helps businesses grow? And how can we then blame a young graduate for preferring a civil service examination to a trade register entry? The choice is rational: they choose the institution that supports them over the one that watches them.
This is not inevitable, and three examples prove it
It is often objected that the State lacks the means to deploy support services everywhere. The argument does not hold, because other administrations have done exactly that, and recently.
The Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship has departmental branches, with published addresses, including in Bakel, Kolda and Mbour. It chose to go to its beneficiaries rather than wait for them in Dakar.
The Senegalese Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency opened its Northern branch in Saint-Louis in December 2025, covering Saint-Louis, Louga and Matam, after its Kaolack branch for the Centre, as part of a planned rollout across the country’s eight development hubs.
The regional development agencies are present in every region. The Kaffrine agency supported more than thirty-five local authorities in 2025 in delivering one hundred and twenty-three projects, worth over two billion CFA francs.
Territorial deployment is therefore neither impossible nor ruinous. It is a policy choice. And when it comes to supporting businesses, that choice has not been made with the same consistency as when it comes to inspecting them.
The particular case of services, and the gap in the system
The same study identifies a blind spot that is never discussed. An exporter of goods has identifiable counterparts: the export promotion agency, the chamber of commerce. An exporter of services has none. The study puts it bluntly: there is almost no continuous support for the promotion of services exports, and no policy for promoting services exports at all.
It adds a finding that amounts to a warning for trade negotiations: oversight is so dispersed that no body gives the government a consolidated view of the services sector. Yet it is the highest authorities who sign agreements binding the entire economy.
This is no secondary matter. Services carry most of the growth of our cities: engineering, consulting, technology, health, education, the creative industries. We built a support system for the economy we had, and not for the one that is coming.
As for the private firms that specialise in supporting SMEs, they do exist, but they too are concentrated in Dakar, and their fees remain out of reach for a large share of micro and small businesses. The market therefore does not correct the State’s absence: it reproduces it.
Four measures that cost almost nothing
This imbalance is corrected by administrative decisions, not by new legislation or a new budget line.
A support point in every department. Not necessarily an agency, nor dedicated premises. One trained official, hosted within an existing structure, whose task is to inform and to direct, and whose name and telephone number are public. The network of public service centres already provides the infrastructure.
The support visit before the inspection visit. When a business formalises, its first encounter with the administration should be an explanation of its obligations and of the schemes it is entitled to. Inspection comes afterwards, and it is then legitimate, because the business knew.
A network of local advisory firms. The State need not do everything itself. It can accredit and mobilise local firms, close to entrepreneurs, for first-line support. The existing firms being concentrated in Dakar and expensive, a scheme of this kind would fill a gap that neither the State nor the market fills today. I proposed such a scheme when I was in office; it did not prosper, and I still believe it is missing.
A territorial indicator of support. Publish, department by department, the number of firms supported, directed towards financing, or admitted to a public scheme. What gets measured eventually gets done, and the absence of measurement explains part of the absence of results.
A question of sequence, not of severity
Let there be no misunderstanding about this text. Tax must be collected, labour law respected, commercial rules enforced. An economy without inspection is not a prosperous economy, it is an economy without a State, and we know what that produces.
The problem is not severity, it is sequence. A State that inspects without having supported punishes an ignorance it has itself sustained. A State that supports first earns the right to inspect afterwards, and it gains more by doing so: more formalisation, more revenue, and businesses that grow instead of hiding.
Our SMEs account for only a modest share of the value Senegal exports. They nonetheless make up the bulk of our productive base and of our jobs. As long as the State presents itself to them first as a risk, they will stay small, and we will go on being surprised.