Paper short abstract:

Senegal put significant resources into the digital transformation. The goal is to show how it is transforming the socio-economic dynamics of an unequal territory and concentrating an important strategic competition between the telecommunications actors, in the name of a certain idea of development.

Paper long abstract:

The « Digital Senegal 2025 » strategy, must serve as a catalyst for modernizing the economy and improving the competitiveness Senegal Emerging Plan.

Digital technology is seen as a way to make up for the lack of traditional infrastructures thanks to online services and the speed of adoption of these solutions. This sector is a way to create new jobs and goods that demonstrate the Africans’ capacity for innovation.

However, access to networks and online services are conditioned by electric access, the economic interests of the operators, as well as the financial and technical capacities of the populations to use Internet.

While there are important demographic and socio-economic inequalities in a territory with important constraints, what are the new territorial dynamics induced by the digital transformation ?

The aim here is to show how competition in the telecommunications sector conditions the discourse, the representations and the spatialization of power between public and private players, between historical economic partners (France) and more recent ones (China).

This competition pushes each player to deploy multiple strategies to assert its influence and power. For private players, the strategic interest is justified by demographic growth, the use of digital solutions and the weak regulations on data. For public players, digital development of the territory is the return of the planning state, while offloading its responsibilities to private players. It is also a way to enhance political action and promote an idea of « development » of the country through digital technology, to attract more investments.