The project
The integrated project led by the Kaolack Departmental Council has three parts: people learn a trade, they produce, and what they produce pays for the training.
Local grains
80%
Millet, maize and sorghum, grown in the department
Imported wheat
20%
Today’s bread depends on it almost entirely
2026Project description, Kaolack Departmental Council
The starting point
Turning grain into flour, then flour into bread, currently takes manual labour and equipment the department does not have. That is the missing link the training centre sets out to equip.
The same work, once equipped: mixer, proofing cabinet, oven. This is the equipment the centre has to bring together, and the trade it has to pass on. Both, not one without the other.
The sector remains heavily dependent on imported wheat flour, which weakens food sovereignty and limits the creation of local value.
Senegalese baking runs on wheat flour, and wheat is not grown in the country. Every loaf sold therefore takes value out of the territory, and makes the price of bread depend on a world market that nobody can influence locally.
Yet the department grows millet and sorghum, and it is the region’s largest sorghum producer. What is missing is not the raw material. It is the know-how to process it, and a place to learn it.
Hence the project’s numerical target: a flour made of 80% local grains, against a dependence on imported wheat that is almost total today.
The three components
Each component has a teaching function and an economic one. That is what separates this project from a conventional training centre that depends on a permanent subsidy.
Baking and food processing
A dual approach (theory, practice, work placement) organised in eight modules, from the craft of bread-making to equipment maintenance. The training focuses on processing the grains grown locally.
School-enterprise
A unit that is both educational and economic: it trains people in catering and in processing poultry products, and it earns the income that keeps the centre running. This is the component that makes the whole thing last without a permanent subsidy.
Agroecological production
The upstream link: growing part of the inputs on site, training people in agroecological practices, and diversifying the site’s income.
Specific objectives
What it aims for
Beneficiaries
Built to last
A project that stops when the aid stops was pointless. Here is what already exists on the ground so that this one keeps going.
| Condition | What already exists in Kaolack |
|---|---|
| Maintaining the machines | The department’s artisans already build and maintain farm equipment. |
| The right to train | Apprenticeship is part of Senegal’s vocational training system. |
| Somewhere to set up | A Chamber of Trades with more than three thousand artisans, and an artisans’ village already standing. |
| Young people to train | Twenty youth centres, and a departmental youth council. |
| Ways to finance | Several microfinance institutions on the ground, including the Chamber of Trades’ own mutual fund. |
| Someone to sell to | Nine of the region’s eleven permanent markets, at the crossroads of four countries. |
2025Kaolack department development plan 2024-2028
An answer to a local request
The first is not an interpretation: a training centre for the artisanal trades appears, as such, in the action plan the department adopted for 2024-2028.
Train
Listed in the department’s action plan for its first year
The training centre and its eight modules
Grow
The first objective of the department’s plan
The irrigated farms of the four communes, the grain supply chain, the school restaurant
Open up
One of the objectives of the department’s plan
One to two hundred young people trained each year, 45% of them women
What the project shifts
Fills the absence of training centres for the artisanal trades, which the department itself names
Addresses the high rate of youth unemployment and the difficulty young people have in accessing financing
Local processing of grains, food supply for the communes
Geneva machines given a second life instead of being scrapped
A stated target of 45% women in each cohort
Cooperation between Geneva artisans, an elected local authority and the grouping of its four communes