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Loi n° 2025-16 is Senegal's foundational horizontal investment statute — the first full recodification since Loi n° 2004-06, which had accumulated 21 years of accumulated amendments and structural gaps. Enacted as a structural pillar of the Faye-Sonko administration's Vision Sénégal 2050 modernisation agenda (the administration that took power in March 2024 under President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko), the law operates on five axes simultaneously.
The new Code mandates a fully digitalised investment-declaration and approval system (guichet unique numérique) that replaces the multi-ministry paper-based circuit inherited from the 2004 framework. A 10-business-day processing guarantee from complete-file submission runs across the digital platform, with investment certificates issued electronically. The digital infrastructure operationalises the "zéro papier" investment environment framing from the government's 2024-25 administrative modernisation programme.
Fiscal and customs stability periods are differentiated by investor location:
| Zone | Stability period | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Dakar + Thiès regions | 3 years | Already high-density investment catchment |
| All other regions | 5 years | Counter-concentration incentive to inland + coastal secondary zones |
This bifurcation reflects the Faye government's stated Vision 2050 objective of reducing Dakar's 80%-share of formal-sector economic activity through targeted geographic incentives. The territorial architecture is structurally analogous to Algeria's Régime des Zones (Hauts-Plateaux / Sud territorial incentives under Loi 22-18) and Ethiopia's preferential investment zones framework.
The Code introduces statutory local-content integration obligations, requiring investors to demonstrate SME-supply-chain sourcing commitments as part of the investment-approval process. This embeds a local-content requirement at the horizontal-framework level rather than only within sector-specific statutes (compare: the filed Loi n° 2019-04 hydrocarbon local-content law, which operates as a vertical instrument for the oil-and-gas sector alone). The statutory language prioritises Senegalese SME participation in both the supply-chain and employment dimensions of eligible investments.
The Code expands the list of eligible investment sectors relative to the 2004 framework, explicitly incorporating:
This expansion is designed to align Senegal's investment incentive perimeter with the post-2024 shift in global FDI toward digital, green, and circular-economy sectors.
Existing core guarantees are retained and updated:
after applicable Senegalese-law obligations are met (aligned with OHADA and ECOWAS free-movement frameworks)
reference to contemporary international-arbitration access (ICSID, OHADA CCJA)
embedded into the incentive-eligibility matrix, meaning the most generous incentive packages are conditioned on demonstrable environmental and social performance alongside economic criteria
hydrocarbon local-content statute and the Faye administration's March 2026 petroleum- and-mining contract renegotiation process operate as sectoral instruments layered above this horizontal Code. Future Senegalese FDI enforcement or incentive actions (Sangomar oil-field Phase 2 development, Grand Tortue Ahmeyim LNG Phase 2, Kédougou mineral-belt greenfield developments) will be constituted under this new framework.
wave of horizontal investment-code recodifications across sub-Saharan Africa: Tanzania Investment Act 2022 (Act No. 10), Algeria Loi 22-18 (2022), and the Morocco Loi-cadre 03-22 Investment Charter. Senegal's new Code introduces the most explicit digital- single-window statutory architecture in the Francophone West Africa subregion, creating a precedent that WAEMU and ECOWAS investment-facilitation bodies may reference.
the parallel General Tax Code recodification (also September 2025), the two forming the legal-infrastructure twin-pillars of the new administration's private-investment framework. The combination of tax-code and investment-code recodification within the same parliamentary session is the most comprehensive legislative overhaul of Senegal's investment environment since the late-1990s structural-adjustment era.
regions is directly relevant to the Kédougou mineral belt (gold, iron, lithium prospects), where historical investor hesitation has centred on regulatory instability. The Faleme iron-ore suspension (filed 2024-07-31 Decree 2024-1502) and the Faye government's ongoing mining-contract renegotiation process create regulatory uncertainty that the Code's stability guarantee is designed to partially counterbalance.
capacity on effective date (2 October 2025), or whether the 10-business-day guarantee will be a legal commitment preceding full platform build-out (as observed in comparable African single-window rollouts).
the 2004 Code's implementing décrets were slow to arrive; the pace of implementing-decree publication will determine effective-date versus operational-date divergence.
risk from the concurrent mining-contract renegotiation process (ongoing CNPC, Woodside, Kosmos review under the Faye administration's 2026 March primature findings).