Narrative
Full Description
Project narrative
On February 8, 2018, during a meeting between the Chinese Ambassador to Senegal Zhang Xun and Senegalese Minister of Economy, Finance and Planning Amadou Ba, the Government of Senegal and China Eximbank signed an RMB 1.05 billion government concessional loan (GCL) agreement and an RMB 200 million grant agreement for Phase 1 of the Smart Senegal Project. The GCL is captured via February 8, 2018. The RMB 200 million grant is captured via Record ID#92565. According to the Government of Senegal’s Aid Management Platform, the GCL disbursed in 2019 and 2020 and achieved an overall disbursement rate of 100%. This project aims to leverage information and communication technology to reduce the digital deficit and make Senegal a sub-regional hub in West Africa, particularly in the areas of security, education, health, and tourism. The Smart Senegal Project consists of five major sub-projects: (1) Safe City: This sub-project aims to strengthen public security through the use of technological tools and processes for the collection, analysis of flows, events from various communication systems and dissemination of information; (2) Smart Education: This sub-project project aims on the one hand to modernize network, processing, and data storage infrastructures and on the other hand to deploy technological platforms to improve teaching and learning in universities, schools elementary, middle and high schools in Senegal. (3) Smart Territories: This sub-project aims to provide user-centered services (citizens, administrations, and businesses) by building a citizen’s house (“La Maison du Citoyen”) in all the country's departments; (4) Submarine Cable: The purpose of this sub-project is to land a submarine cable in Senegal allowing access to international bandwidth. This new device will increase Senegal's internet capacity and vary the Internet access offer for ISPs; and (5) Smart Wifi: The Smart Wifi sub-project project aims to fight against the digital isolation of territories by increasing the number of digital access points. It will allow citizens to access a high-speed internet connection in public places. This access will be open to all citizens and will be available on all types of terminals (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.). In essence, this project aims to support the digital transformation of Senegal's networks. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is the contractor responsible for implementation. Project implementation began in January 2019, and in early 2021, Huawei installed an online-meeting platform for the central government of Senegal, allowing high-level officials to meet virtually amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The digital hub portion of the project was completed on June 22, 2021, when Senegal's President, Macky Sall, and the Chinese Ambassador to Senegal officially put into service a Tier 3 Senegalese Data Center (with a capacity of 1,000 terabytes) built on the outskirts of Diamniadio. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Government of Senegal also announced its plans to transfer government data to the facility. Senegal's Agence de l’Informatique de l’Etat (State Computer Science Agency, ADIE) supervised the construction of the facility and announced at the ribbon-cutting ceremony its plans to (a) connect the facility to an international submarine cable and (b) construct another data center in the city of Kaolack.
Staff comments
1. The French project title is Projet Smart Senegal. The Chinese project title is “智慧塞内加尔”项目. 2. On June 22, 2021, Senegal announced it would move its government data and digital platforms to a new national data center financed by a loan of $83.3 million USD from the Export-Import Bank of China and built by Huawei, which also provided equipment and technical support. The first phase of the new center, located in the Digital Technology Park in Diamniadio, will be open in six months and will also house data from state-owned enterprises in Senegal. The announcement comes on the heels of another agreement signed between Huawei and the African Telecommunications Union (a specialized agency of the African Union), which stipulates that the Chinese company will engage at multiple levels of ICT integration and transformation with AU member states. This will likely involve skills development and training for personnel in local ICT sectors, and information exchange on the latest technological trends and expansion of rural connectivity across Africa. 3. Senegal’s Ministry of Finance identifies a $150 million China Eximbank loan agreement for the Smart Senegal Project, which was signed on August 8, 2018. It is not clear if this represents a separate loan commitment from the RMB 1.05 billion government concessional loan agreement that was signed on February 8, 2018. This issue warrants further investigation. 4. As this project was denominated in RMB and identified as a government concessional loan from China Eximbank, AidData assumes the following borrowing terms: a maturity period of 20 years, an interest rate of 2%, and a grace period of 5 years. This issue warrants further investigation. 5. The Chinese Loans to Africa (CLA) Database, managed by the Boston University Global Development Policy (GDP) Center, claims that the Chinese Eximbank issued a $148 million loan commitment for the 'Diamniadio Data Centre Restructuring' project in 2021 (see https://www.bu.edu/gdp/files/2023/08/GCI_PB_019_CLA-2023-FIN.pdf). AidData has not independently corroborated the claim that a $148 million loan was issued in 2021 by China Eximbank in addition to the RMB 1.05 billion that it issued in 2018.