Building a Modern Senegal: Ports, Airports, and Technology Transfer

 

The cooperation of Senegal and the United Arab Emirates is bound to transform major expanding centres of the economy, the outlook of modernization and most importantly the relocation of desirable technological talents to the Senegalese populace. Two port projects can be identified: management of existing container terminal in Dakar and the construction of new deep-water port in Ndayane. The operational wisdom and progressive management behaviours which will be invested by Emirati partners are the sources of these initiatives and their ultimate valuation to the workers is immense as far as trade and logistic activities are concerned. The fact that one of the planned participants of the Port of Dakar is a UAE company, contrary to mentioning shipbuilding technology transfer, is an essential fact. It is not exclusively a matter of foreign businesses in Senegal but of bringing Senegalese engineers, technicians, dockworkers up to 21 st century industrial needs of the sea and increasing the capacity and wage rate of the whole industry.

This is carried over to the skies to upskill. An Emirati firm has already been incorporated in the pilot training programmes of Blaise Diagne International Airport. This ensures higher safety and standard in the aviation sector and it is a direct investment into the pinnacle of human capital in Senegal. The initiative produces valuable and skilled jobs by training future generation of pilots in international standards in Senegal and will minimise overseas training, intellectual and financial capital will be retained in the country. This kind of foreign investment in ports and the aviation sector is the best case scenario of investment in a country that creates local capacity, so that Senegalese workers are not labourers but are in fact masters of the new infrastructure of the country.