Senegal as an illustration of a new paradigm of productive reconstruction
By Dr. Papa Demba Thiam
The annual African Governors Caucus of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund provides a privileged moment for reflection on the economic challenges facing the continent. The 2026 edition, held in Banjul, comes at a particular moment. Across Africa, governments are simultaneously seeking macroeconomic stability, debt sustainability, investment recovery, job creation, and structural transformation of their economies.
Senegal perfectly illustrates this situation. The resumption of discussions with the International Monetary Fund offers an opportunity to move beyond the narrow framework of macroeconomic adjustment to open up a more fundamental reflection: how to sustainably rebuild the productive capacity of an economy?
To this question, one answer deserves to be placed at the heart of public policies today: no economy develops sustainably without integrated value chains.
Conversely, an economy is not destroyed solely by war, sanctions, hyperinflation, or a financial crisis. It can be gradually weakened by a much more discreet phenomenon: the silent dismantling of its value chains.
When a country ceases to link its producers, processors, logisticians, financial institutions, markets, skills, and institutions around common productive goals, it not only loses growth. It gradually loses its capacity to organize value creation.
Senegal, however, has considerable assets: agricultural, fisheries, mining, energy, industrial, entrepreneurial, and human resources. But these resources remain insufficiently connected in integrated, financed, and coherently governed value chains. The problem is not only macroeconomic. It is primarily microeconomic, productive, institutional, and strategic.
In this context, the resumption of discussions with the IMF represents an opportunity that goes far beyond negotiating a new program. It can become the starting point for a true productive reconstruction, provided that macroeconomic stabilization is not seen as an end in itself, but as a consequence of an economy capable of producing more value added, jobs, tax revenues, and exports.
This is precisely the change in perspective that this note proposes.
Having competent technocrats within a government is naturally an asset. But it is not enough. Technical skills produce lasting results only when they are part of a coherent strategic orientation. Without a common doctrine, the best profiles risk efficiently managing fragmented sectors rather than rebuilding an integrated economic system.
The priority should therefore be to evolve public action from a mainly top-down macroeconomy to a bottom-up constructive macroeconomy. This approach begins with the reconstruction of the productive microeconomy through integrated value chains, followed by the creation of financial infrastructures tailored to these value chains. Only then can macroeconomic aggregates reflect real wealth creation, before the mesoeconomic architecture is adjusted to sustainably support this dynamic.
This sequence reverses the logic that has long dominated development policies. It no longer considers value chains as just one sector among others. It makes them the fundamental unit for rebuilding economies.
The Thiam Threshold, or Strategic Relevance Threshold, provides a framework for understanding this transformation. It reminds us that public policy, an institution, or a government becomes truly effective only when their objectives, skills, instruments, governance, and incentives are sufficiently coherent to produce the desired results. Below this threshold, intentions often surpass results.
In this perspective, the central question is no longer just about restoring budgetary balances. It becomes: how to rebuild value chains capable of sustainably producing these balances?
For Senegal and many African economies, five priorities now appear essential:
1. Map out priority value chains and identify their ruptures.
2. Redirect public investments towards repairing these ruptures.
3. Build financial infrastructures directly derived from the needs of value chains.
4. Reorganize public institutions around measurable productive objectives rather than sectoral administrative logics.
5. Evaluate economic policies based on jobs created, value added, exports, tax revenues, and the reduction of avoidable imports.
The real challenge of discussions between African governments, the World Bank Group, and the IMF should therefore no longer be solely about stabilizing economies. It should be about their productive reconstruction.
Senegal does not just need to restore its accounts. It needs to restore its value chains.
Because an economy does not die when it lacks resources. It weakens when its resources cease to be connected to produce value.
And it rebuilds when public policy, institutions, finance, territories, and skills converge towards a common goal: turning productive opportunities into shared prosperity.
