Since the 2000s, development strategies have placed particular emphasis on infrastructure as a mechanism capable of initiating production and attracting investment. Since 2014 this has been reinforced by the development strategy based on the Plan Sénégal Émergent (Emerging Senegal Plan) PSE, which has made it possible to implement priority economic reforms and investment projects opening the way to growth while preserving the economy and debt viability. Financing is a major problem, in the face of the breathlessness of the budgetary machine and the constraints of compliance with a rate of indebtedness in conformity with convergence criteria. This context rendered resorting to public-private partnerships unavoidable.
Senegal has relied on an attractive regulatory and institutional framework to make Public- Private Plans (PPP) a privileged means of financing while respecting social equilibrium. Unfortunately, the system has not been as effective in preventing the inefficiency of private action and respect for women’s human rights and the environment. The case of the construction of the toll motorway has shown the limits of the PPP model, through the relative high cost of infrastructure, the loss of human life and the prejudices suffered by displaced persons, especially women. The case also points to the additional efforts required in order to reduce their risks and negative impacts.
The Highway of the Future
This is not another ‘sob story’. In this animated short, Mariama, a Senegalese woman, recounts how the building of the Highway of the Future in Dakar profoundly impacted her life and the lives of people who were meant to benefit from this initiative. A Public-Private Partnership in Senegal offered Mariama the opportunity of being relocated to a new area, with running water, electricity, nice schools, and a thriving economy in exchange for making room for the construction of a major highway. Instead, Mariama and alongside 30 thousand people were relocated to a site near the infamous Mbeumbeuss waste dump – the biggest landfill in West Africa, far away from everything, and everyone.
I have never used the Highway of the Future and
I probably never will.
The Podcast
In the episode “The Case of Senegal,” Senegalese feminist scholars Fatou Sow and Dr Marème Ndoye Faye discuss the inclusion of the PPP model in Senegal, referencing the construction of the Dakar-Diamniadio highway, also known as The Highway of the Future, and its subsequent conflictive impact on women’s lives.
Connect The Dots
Faced with the challenges linked to PPPs, Senegal very quickly understood the interest of supervising PPP interventions. Since 2004 Senegal equipped itself, with a legislative framework allowing the construction and operation, of public interest infrastructures within the PPP framework. However, the general interest and the concern to take gender into account lead to asking questions on the interactions with social inequalities, human rights, and gender in PPP contracts.
The objective of this study is to measure the impact of PPPs on the feminist development framework, or in other words, regarding for women’s human rights. So, it is relevant to first analyze the economic and social context in the country. It will then examine the gender policy, as well as the policy and implementation of PPPs in Senegal with the specific case of road infrastructure.
Read now Corporate Responsibility and Women’s Human Rights: A Feminist Analytical Approach to Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) by Dr Marème Ndoye