What the General Policy Statement of 8 September 2026 says about youth employment, what it does not say, and what an installation scheme would really cost.

The General Policy Statement delivered on September 8, 2026, by Prime Minister Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo is a serious document. It clearly outlines the state of public finances, identifies seven structural constraints, and makes more demanding methodological commitments than those to which the country is accustomed. This is not a text that can be dismissed out of hand.

This is precisely why it must be read closely on its most vulnerable point, which is not the one being discussed. This point is neither the debt, nor the program with the International Monetary Fund, nor the list of major projects. It is the gap between a remarkably accurate diagnosis of youth issues and the absence, in the 16,000 words that follow, of any mechanism capable of addressing them at the pace that the diagnosis itself dictates.

This report aims to establish this gap, to explore its causes in forty years of failed development policies, and then to describe what a system commensurate with the problem would look like, its cost, its financing, and the conditions for its success. It is written by a practitioner, not a researcher: the proposals it contains are currently being implemented in municipalities within the peanut basin, and it is for this reason, and no other, that they warrant consideration.

1. A correct diagnosis, but no response.

The constraint that the Government itself identifies

Among the seven constraints that the Prime Minister identifies "in order of urgency," the third is that of the demographic dividend. The passage deserves to be quoted in full: "Our population is young and will remain so for a long time (50% under 19 and 75% under 35). This youth is our greatest asset, but it is only an advantage if we educate, nurture, and employ them at the rate they enter the labor market; otherwise, they become a burden, then a source of resentment. The window of opportunity is narrow: one generation, no more."

» 1 .

Three propositions are contained within these lines, and they are all accurate. The first is a given: the age structure of the population, confirmed by the 2023 census, ² guarantees that cohorts entering the labor market will remain massive for at least two decades. The second is a criterion: what matters is not the volume of jobs created but their rate, relative to the rate of entry. The third is a political prediction: the overload is turning into anger.

The pace of growth is the most important criterion, and it's the one that disappears from the rest of the document. A country can announce a million jobs over ten years and completely miss its demographic target if these jobs arrive at the end of the period, if they are concentrated in construction phases, or if they are not located where young people are. The entire question posed by constraint number 3 is that of an annual flow comparable to the annual flow of new entrants. None of the subsequent announcements are formulated in these terms.

The figure of 1,520,000 jobs and what it encompasses

The Declaration announces, by 2029, "a global potential of 1,520,000 jobs"

", the main sources of which are detailed: 113,500 jobs linked to Community Agricultural Cooperatives, 60,000 in artisanal fishing and the blue economy, 50,000 in affordable housing, 45,000 in agropoles, 33,000 in cultural and creative industries, 27,000 around the Youth Olympic Games, 22,000 in the dairy and poultry sectors, 18,000 in aquaculture, 16,000 in renewable energies 3 .

Four observations are necessary.

First, the word used is "potential," and the text itself requests that these projections "be broken down into verifiable contributions, accompanied by trajectories, milestones, responsibilities, and integration rates." This is an admission, within the document itself, that we are dealing with an estimate of a master plan and not a program. The distinction is not semantic: a projection is revised, a program is implemented.

Next, the sum of the listed deposits reaches approximately 385,000 jobs. The remaining 1,135,000 are not broken down. Over a three-year horizon, in an economy where the Prime Minister also indicates that non-hydrocarbon growth has fallen to 2.2% by 2025, the magnitude of this figure warrants, at the very least, a methodological explanation.

Furthermore, the main agricultural potential—113,500 jobs for the 100 Community Agricultural Cooperatives announced in the same document—assumes more than 1,100 jobs per cooperative within three years. No information is provided on the land involved, water resources, the status of the individuals concerned, their training, their establishment methods, or the markets for their produce. A cooperative is not a system for establishing a farm: it is a legal structure. It says nothing about what, in practice, puts a young person on equipped land with a buyer on the other side.

Finally, several job opportunities are temporary by nature. The 27,000 jobs linked to the Youth Olympic Games, and some of those in housing and major construction projects, are construction-based jobs. They are significant, but they do not represent a permanent flow of employment.

The Departures: Compassion and Transfers

The treatment of emigration in this document is revealing, and it must be described precisely rather than claiming that it is absent.

It appears twice. The first time is in the preamble, where the Prime Minister addresses his thoughts "to the young people who risk their lives in the ocean for an often imaginary Eldorado," and "to the Senegalese diaspora living in precarious circumstances, torn between returning home and a stressful life abroad," within a long and heartfelt enumeration of national suffering. The second time is in the financial development section, where the diaspora is presented as a source of savings: an estimated 2,642 billion francs in remittances by 2025, of which the text rightly notes that "almost all are directed towards current expenses." It then reappears as a target for investment funds, as a pool of talent, and as a force that is "an investor, a builder, and an ambassador."

The status is therefore clear: an object of compassion before departure, a source of revenue afterward. Between the two—that is, precisely where public policy would have a role to play—there is nothing. Nothing about the 166,561 Senegalese that the 2023 census recorded as emigrants between 2018 and 2023, compared to 56,401 entries. ⁵ Nothing about the Nicaragua route, taken in a single year by more than 20,000 Senegalese apprehended at the southern border of the United States.⁶ Nothing about the entry restrictions that have affected all Senegalese nationals since January 2026 and that now penalize students, traders, and families.

This omission has analytical, not just political, consequences. It obscures the fact that emigration is the only indicator that directly measures the gap between the flow of arrivals and the flow of jobs—precisely what constraint number 3 identifies as the decisive criterion. By leaving this variable out of the scope, the document deprives itself of the very instrument for its own diagnosis.

1. Why installation devices have been failing for forty years

The lack of a system is not unique to this government. It has been a constant feature of Senegalese agricultural policy since the end of the rentier economy, and we must understand the mechanism if we want to propose something other than yet another variation.

Three regimes, one same position for the peasant

Under the peanut economy, the family farm is a supplier of raw materials. ONCAD provides seeds and fertilizer, SODEVA provides support, SONACOS processes the peanuts, and the price is regulated. The system works—harvesting averaged 750,000 tons in the 1960s , and peanut products accounted for up to 80% of exports.

8 — but he never capitalizes on the farm: the farmer remains a tenant of a state system.

Structural adjustment eliminates the system without replacing it. The New Agricultural Policy of 1984, the dissolution of ONCAD, the disappearance of SODEVA, the liquidation of BNDS in 1990, the devaluation of 1994, and the privatization of SONACOS in 2005 left producers without credit, inputs, support services, and guaranteed buyers. Collection was reduced by two-thirds. ⁹

The third period — GOANA, PSE, PRACAS, now Vision 2050 — sees the State return through input subsidies and large rural projects. But the position

The farmer's situation does not change: he is the recipient of an annual transfer that builds nothing, and a spectator of projects conceived elsewhere.

What is missing, each time, from the installation devices

The PRODAC community agricultural estates, the ANIDA village and family farms, and the agropoles have mobilized considerable resources. Their results are, at best, heterogeneous. Five causes recur with a regularity that is not due to chance.

1. The order of things. First, you set up, then you look for the market. Without a pre-existing contractual buyer, the first season's production doesn't find a buyer, and the farmer falls back on self-consumption or gives up.
2. The lack of selection based on competence. Beneficiaries are designated according to administrative or political criteria, without verified qualifications. Intensive irrigated farming is a skilled profession; it fails in the hands of someone who hasn't learned it.
3. The lack of long-term follow-up. The investment is delivered, the inauguration takes place, and then the support stops. The under-resourced decentralized services cannot provide it.
4. Free of charge. An asset received without compensation is neither maintained nor renewed, and it generates no resources to install the next one. The system stops when the budget stops.
5. Land insecurity. The operator works on land for which he has no title, which precludes any investment logic on his part and any credit logic on the part of a financier.

A system that does not correct these five points will reproduce the same results, regardless of the sums involved and regardless of its name.

1. The budget gap: what the state already spends without any proven effect

Input subsidy

Agricultural input subsidies amount to approximately 130 billion francs for the 2026 season: nearly 65 billion for mineral fertilizers, 44.9 billion for seeds, 13 billion for mechanization and equipment, and 2.52 billion for other products.

plant protection products 10. The amount has increased more than tenfold in twenty years: the subsidy for fertilizers amounted to 4.6 billion in 2005 and to 18.1 billion in 2013 11 , in an agricultural budget that increased from 136 billion in 2010 to 264 billion in 2014 12 .

The assessment of this expenditure is available and consistent. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre establishes that the program increases fertilizer use but has no measurable effect on the yields of the main crops or on the economic performance of the beneficiaries, due to delivery delays, the quality of the inputs, and a crowding-out effect on commercial purchases. ¹³ IPAR notes that the allocation criteria vary from one commission to another, that a portion of the inputs does not reach the fields, and that the subsidy is captured by large farms to the detriment of small producers. ¹⁴

The crucial point, however, is not the relative inefficiency of the expenditure: it is its nature. An input is consumed within a year. It leaves no assets behind. The producer who received it is, the following year, neither better equipped, nor better trained, nor better connected to a buyer. One hundred and thirty billion francs per year, renewed for fifteen years, represents 2 trillion francs that generate no capital.

Social transfers

The family security grant envelope, increased to 70 billion in September 2026, will be doubled to 140 billion in 2027 to cover one million households, out of a total of 1,000,649 vulnerable households identified by the ANSD, of which only 355,013 are actually covered .

The instrument is legitimate and necessary for households unable to work. However, it is structurally incapable of helping those who can: a transfer is renewed indefinitely, and its recipient remains a beneficiary. The public policy issue is not to choose between protection and integration, but to prevent the budget for the latter from being absorbed by the former due to a lack of available support mechanisms.

The principle of redeployment is already accepted

One point that has received little attention in the commentary must be emphasized. The General Policy Statement itself lays out the principle of redeployment, twice. First, regarding energy: “Would we want to continue spending around 800 billion on fuel subsidies, 65% of which will be captured by the wealthiest 20% of households? Or, on the contrary, should these wealthy households pay the true price and redirect part of the subsidy to the National Family Security Fund?” Second, and even more importantly, regarding agriculture, in a brief sentence: “Agricultural subsidies will gradually shift towards investment and income security.” 16

This sentence contains the essence of the argument presented in this document. It does not include any specific terms, vehicle, timeline, or amount. The purpose of the following pages is to propose some.

1. What would an installation device look like?

The unit: a one-hectare irrigated family farm

The basic unit is not a rainfed field but an intensive, year-round irrigated farm: a 50-meter individual borehole equipped with a solar pump, a buffer tank, a drip irrigation system, four 0.25-hectare plots rotated, dairy and sheep farming on the concession, and off-season crops geared towards export and import substitution. Where surface water is available, the system is adapted to it; where only a deep aquifer exists, it relies on a communal borehole; where neither is accessible, the municipality does not enter the first phase. The resource dictates the system, not the other way around.

Solar power is not merely an environmental embellishment: it eliminates the need for fuel, the primary reason for abandoning motorized areas, and it makes operation independent of any grid. Its technical drawback is that it stores water, not electricity.

The scale: the municipal module

An isolated farm does not constitute a system. Deployment is done through communal modules of 1,000 farms, distributed in groups of 50 linked to existing villages.

This avoids creating settlements from scratch, preserves village social cohesion, and gives the village chief a direct stake in the project. The module is deployed at a rate of 100 installations per year, a pace dictated not by available funds but by the number of people who can actually be trained, installed, and monitored annually.

Each module includes a central farm that fulfills three functions: a technical hub where routes are tested before being disseminated, a training platform for on-the-job experience, and a contractual buyer of the family farms' produce. This represents a reversal of the order of factors: the central farm and the buyer precede the farms.

The four locks

1. Prior training and certification are required. No one is allowed to set up a farm without having received on-the-job training at the central farm, under the supervision of a university-affiliated instructor. Access to funding is contingent upon certification.
2. Contractual buyer. Each farm is linked by contract to a buyer, with a farmgate price schedule known in advance.
3. Monitoring is provided by established professionals. The decentralized services retain their control role, but local support is provided by graduates from local universities who are themselves established as service providers — insemination, health monitoring, technical advice, collection.
4. Land security. The municipal deliberation and the lease and title process are a prerequisite, not a subsequent regularization.

The territory: housing, services, energy

Because the family lives on the farm, the system is also a planning mechanism. Grouped housing in villages of 50 farms makes a central village possible for each module: a group of 1,000 farms represents 6,000 to 8,000 inhabitants, the size of a small town, capable of supporting a complete school, a health center, a market, and above all, the private services that create the second largest source of employment—inputs, maintenance of solar equipment, contract mechanization, transport and refrigeration, veterinary services, and local credit. One can estimate one service job for every three to four farms.

Domestic energy is provided by solar power and battery storage, without connection to the grid: approximately 1 to 2 kWp and 5 kWh per concession, with cooking powered by biogas from the barn. Battery replacement is included in the operating budget, which is essential to avoid repeating the mistakes of solar installations abandoned after the first failure. This self-sufficiency has a direct budgetary consequence: each village served by the concession represents one less locality to connect, out of the 6,471 that the Universal Access Program still needs to electrify. ¹⁷

One last point, rarely addressed yet crucial over a twenty-five-year horizon: a one-hectare farm cannot be divided. The rule of succession—a single heir to farm, the others directed towards services or a new module, with possible expansion at the expense of the farmer who owns land—must be established from the outset, otherwise the fragmentation that ruined peanut farms will be reproduced in a single generation.

1. Funding: 20 million per farm, with no new expenses

The cost

The complete installation of a farm—solar drilling and pumping, irrigation and storage tank, domestic power, living quarters, initial livestock, and working capital for the first season—is estimated at a maximum of 20 million francs. This ceiling assumes modular deployment: a drilling rig that drills a hundred wells in the same municipality does not charge the price of a single well, and the same applies to pumps, batteries, and materials.

One hundred thousand farms over fifteen years therefore represent 2,000 billion francs, or about 133 billion per year — the exact order of magnitude of the annual input subsidy.

The refund

At full capacity, a one-hectare farm generates an annual profit of 5 to 6 million francs, based on actual farmgate prices and conservative yield estimates. Financing is not a subsidy but a lease-purchase agreement, in accordance with Islamic finance principles, with each asset financed over its own lifespan: fifteen years for the well and pumping equipment, six to seven years for the irrigation system, ten years for the domestic solar equipment (the lifespan of the batteries), and twenty to twenty-five years for the dwelling. Livestock is managed through a revolving fund and is repaid in kind. The total annual payment is around 1.5 million francs in the first few years, then decreases as short-term assets are sold off.

The debt collection mechanism is the critical point, and this is where this arrangement differs from forty years of failed agricultural credit: the buyer, contractually bound to the farm, deducts the payment at source from deliveries and remits it to the fund. There is no need to prepare a file, no individual debt collection, and no mass litigation.

The vehicle

The resources thus identified constitute the capital of an investment fund for agricultural installation, which can be housed in an existing public vehicle rather than in a new agency. Two properties result from this.

The first is that it is recapitalized: from the fifth or sixth year onward, repayments finance a growing share of the new installations, and the annual public contribution decreases at a constant rate. The second is that it is financeable: recurring public capital, backed by municipal agreements, purchase contracts, and a repayment history, corresponds exactly to what the Islamic Development Bank, Gulf funds, and regional development banks are looking for, using instruments they are familiar with—the Declaration, moreover, announces the development of Islamic finance and Takafu . The expected leverage is two to three times the capital.

The State's net annual budgetary effort is therefore between 50 and 70 billion francs, entirely financed by progressive redeployment of existing expenditures, without new line items, without additional sovereign borrowing and without creation of structures.

The condition of acceptability

The redeployment of input subsidies cannot be abrupt or uniform: hundreds of thousands of producers depend on them every winter. It must be gradual and localized—every franc withdrawn from a municipality's subsidy must be returned to that municipality in the form of infrastructure. Producers who lose their subsidized fertilizer should see a replacement program open on their land. This is possible precisely because the system is implemented at the municipal level.

1. Consistency with previously established objectives

This mechanism does not require the Government to change its objectives. It offers a tool to achieve those it has itself set.

1. Food sovereignty: the Declaration aims, by 2029, to meet 100% of onion needs, 96% of meat needs and 40% of milk needs.19 These are exactly the three products of the family farm described here.
2. Water mobilization on 320,000 hectares: one hundred thousand one-hectare farms represent almost a third of this, with an identified project owner for each.

1. Profitable productive activity period extended from three to five months: an irrigated farm produces twelve months out of twelve.
2. Farm household incomes up 25%: the gap between a rainfed farm and an irrigated farm with equipment is of a completely different order.
3. Decent housing, increased from 56% to 75% of the population, with support for a national building materials sector: the rural component of this objective currently lacks any model. The bioclimatic housing module using local materials provides one such model.
4. Act IV of decentralization, announced to move from administrative decentralization to development decentralization: the municipal module is an operational component, and the deployment announced by the South, Central and Northern hubs corresponds to the areas where the system is already underway.

Finally, it satisfies the two methodological rules that the Government has set for itself: it is prepared — municipal agreements, operating accounts, tested technical routes, purchasing partnerships — and its impact is demonstrable by design, since it pays for itself.

1. Objections and limitations

Three serious objections must be addressed, and it would be dishonest to avoid them.

The first point concerns the scale. One hundred thousand farms over fifteen years represent, including service jobs, 250,000 to 300,000 stable jobs, or about 20,000 per year, compared to annual cohorts of several hundred thousand. The system does not absorb the cohort. What it demonstrates is that a model exists, that it works at the cost the State is already incurring, and that there is no reason to stop at one hundred modules when the country has more than five hundred municipalities.

The second point concerns water resources. Intensive exploitation of shallow aquifers must be regulated by piezometric monitoring and extraction rules based on volume. This is preliminary technical work, to be carried out with the water management services, and it constitutes the main limiting factor for the trajectory—more so than funding.

The third point concerns implementation capacity. The target rate of one hundred installations per year per module is restrictive and will be perceived as slow. In reality, it is a guarantee: a system whose limiting factor is the number of trained personnel cannot be accelerated for purely promotional reasons. This is its most fundamental difference from previous programs.

Conclusion

The Prime Minister wrote that the window of opportunity was one generation, no more. This is true, and it means that a youth employment policy is judged by its annual flow, not its announced total.

What is proposed here requires neither new legislation, nor an agency, nor additional expenditure. It requires three decisions: to recognize the municipal installation module as an instrument of public policy and not as a local project; to give a vehicle, a timeline, and a budget to the already written statement that

"Agricultural subsidies will gradually evolve towards investment"; and to include the protocol between municipalities and local universities in the national vocational training system.

These three decisions are subject to arbitration. They cannot be photographed.

1General policy statement by Prime Minister Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo before the National Assembly, September 8, 2026, full text.

2 National Agency for Statistics and Demography (ANSD), Fifth General Population and Housing Census (RGPH-5), 2023.

3DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.

4DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.

5ANSD, RGPH-5, op. cit.

6U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Southern Border Encounter Statistics, Fiscal Year 2023. The figure includes apprehended individuals and therefore constitutes a floor.

7 Centre for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD), work on the crisis in the Senegalese peanut sector, 1990s.

8 Noba K. et al., “Peanuts in Senegal: current situation, constraints and prospects for the revival of the sector”, OCL, vol. 21, 2014.

9CIRAD, op. cit.

10Monthly Government press conference, Dakar, January 29, 2026: allocation of the 2026 agricultural campaign budget.

11Agricultural and Rural Foresight Initiative (IPAR), Agricultural input subsidies in Senegal: controversies and realities, Report on the state of agriculture and the rural world in Senegal, 2015.

12European Commission, JRC, Agricultural input subsidies in Senegal: comparative analysis of three intervention methods, JRC120454.

13 European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), The agricultural input subsidy programme in Senegal, evaluation report, JRC131016.

14IPAR, 2015, op. cit.

15DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.

18DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.

19DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.

17DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.

16DPG of September 8, 2026, op. cit.