What was the President of Senegal Bassirou Faye doing at the U.S Silicon Valley in California?
The President of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye has just led an official delegation from Dakar to America’s Silicon Valley in the State of California.
They were accompanied by the United States Coordinator for International Information and Communications Policy Ambassador Steve Lang, Special Representative for Global Partnerships Dorothy McAuliffe, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for West Africa Michael Heath.
The Senegalese Government delegation visited, among other places, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Sunnyvale in California, during the final week of September 2024.
According to a statement from the U.S Department of state, the delegation from the Government of Senegal was led by President Faye accompanied by the Senegalese Minister of Communication, Telecommunications, and Digital Economy Alioune Sall, Minister of Finance and Budget, Cheikh Diba, and other senior government officials from Dakar.
While in California, the group held audience with entrepreneurs and representatives from tech companies, academia, financial institutions, Senegalese start-up companies, and the Senegalese diaspora community in the United States.
The joint visit was said to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to supporting Africa’s digital transformation and deepening partnerships between the United States and Senegal and between the U.S African partners and the American private sector and academic institutions.Â
The visit closely follows Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s September 23 launch of the Partnership for Global Inclusivity on Artificial Intelligence and other initiatives.
The partnership aims at harnessing the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and advancing its sustainable development globally.
Dakar recently launched the government’s Digital Senegal Strategy 2025, which aims to make the country a hub for digital transformation in Africa and beyond.
The targets are rather ambitious, according to the World Bank report, including to bring digital up to 10 percent of Senegal’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2025 and create 54,000 direct and 162,000 indirect jobs.
Some more concrete achievements include laws lifting restrictions for new market entries of internet providers, and strengthened regulations for essential infrastructure sharing between operators.
However, there are many challenges facing Dakar in order for Senegal to accomplish the goals.
For instance, while Internet services in Senegal are no longer a luxury, the cost of mobile broadband subscriptions still accounts for 12 percent of average monthly gross income per capita.
This is rather expensive compared to 6 percent in Kenya, 5 percent in Ghana, and 2 percent in Cape Verde.
At the same time, mobile broadband connections in Senegal that is 3G and 4G bandwidth reach only 19 percent of the population, a modest coverage against 67 percent in Cape Verde, 55 percent in Ghana and 50 percent in Cote d’Ivoire.
Largely as a result, Senegal scores only 132nd out of 150 countries on the 2016 GSMA Mobile Connectivity Index and 142nd out of 190 on the 2017 United Nations ICT Development Index.