From survival to scale: How Senegal is building a pipeline of growth firms

Logidoo, formerly 2W Logistics, is a Senegalese logistics company. It had been operating for years before growth constraints began to weigh. Foundations were already in place, but scale remained elusive. The company faced familiar hurdles: limited visibility, organizational challenges, and difficulties expanding internationally. Like many small businesses, it was looking less for a shortcut than for clearer pathways to move forward. That opportunity took shape when Logidoo engaged with the Agence de Développement et d’Encadrement des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (ADEPME), as part of a broader national effort to provide small businesses with more structured, practical support to scale up operations. Through the support of the Senegal Jobs, Economic Transformation and Recovery Program for Results (JET Program), or ETER in French, Logidoo received strategic support covering promotion, distribution, certifications, e-commerce, and expansion abroad. It completed an organizational, financial, and commercial upgrade, developed subregional franchises in Guinea, and made a major technology upgrade, with 75 percent of the technology development costs financed by the program. Its establishment in Côte d’Ivoire was also supported through legal and tax assistance and coverage of 75 percent of its annual rental costs. One year later, the business had increased its revenue by 21.2 percent, while export revenue rose by 85.97 percent after expansion to Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire markets. Its permanent workforce grew from 21 to 57 employees, including 19 women. Logidoo’s transformation shows what the JET Program is designed to achieve: helping promising Senegalese firms scale, enter new markets, and create more and better jobs. What Holds Senegal's Businesses Back? Logidoo’s journey from a constrained local business to a growing regional firm is the story the JET Program was designed to make possible. To understand what the program set out to achieve, it's important to first understand the context. Senegal’s formal private sector is among the smallest in sub-Saharan Africa: only 1.3 percent of firms are formal and have five or more employees. More than 94 percent of businesses operate informally, with low productivity and limited capacity to grow, hire, or export. The constraints are well documented: a burdensome regulatory environment, limited access to finance, low technology adoption, and market failures along key value chains. The latest Enterprise Survey data (2025) show 23.7 percent of Senegalese companies identify business licensing as a major constraint, that’s nearly double the global average. The World Bank’s Firm-level Adoption of Technology survey (2020) also found that Senegalese firms still rely on pre-digital technologies to perform basic business functions. Among 1,800 surveyed firms, only 36 percent use a computer, 30 percent use a smartphone, and just 34 percent use the internet for business purposes. These are the challenges the JET Program was designed to address. How Is the JET Program Helping Businesses Grow? Businesses like Logidoo did not benefit from a single intervention. Launched in 2021 with a $125 million International Development Association (IDA) investment, the JET Program was designed to work on several fronts: strengthening institutions that support businesses while directly supporting firms. It operates through the government's Program for the Acceleration of Competitiveness and Employment (PACE), coordinated by the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Plan with eight implementing agencies working across sector competitiveness, SME technology adoption and support, access to finance, and reforms to mobilize private investments. What makes this program distinctive is the institutional architecture it helped create with institutions intended to outlast any individual project cycle and to sustain support at scale: • Four new SME service windows at ADEPME, provide structured support to firms at different stages from formalization to technology adoption to export readiness. • The Competitiveness Task Force develops targeted action plans for priority value chains to identify local firm champions that are supported by structured public-private dialogues to diagnose constraints. • The Oyass Fund, launched by Senegal’s Sovereign Fund for Strategic Investments (FONSIS) in January 2024, Senegal’s first SME-dedicated investment equity fund. By end 2025, it had a pipeline of 49 projects across 13 sectors (about €38 million in financing needs), with 27 percent of businesses led by women. • The PPP Project Preparation Fund and a strengthened UNAPPP unit, to improve the identification, preparation, and structuring of PPP projects. These are not administrative boxes checked. They represent a step in the government’s capacity to support the private sector at scale. Implementing JET reinforced a core lesson: supporting individual firms without building the ecosystem around them produces limited and short-lived results. Firms need sustained access to information, services, finance, and markets, and properly equipped institutions can provide that support. How Is the Program Driving Growth and Jobs? As of early 2026, the program has already: • Supported over 8,000 SMEs through ADEPME’s matching grants (exceeding the original target of 2,500 by over 300 percent) with over 40 percent of beneficiaries in agribusiness and 52 percent of beneficiaries women-owned or women-managed. • Allocated more than $17.8 million in performance matching grants for technology adoption, helping firms digitize operations, adopt sector-specific technologies, and improve management. • Mobilized over $26 million in partial credit guarantees through the Priority Investment Guarantee Fund (FONGIP), including $3.4 million for women-owned SMEs. • Supported the formalization of more than 5,000 companies. • Businesses supported by the program collectively created or maintained more than 71,000 jobs based on government reports by ADEPME (54%) and FONGIP (46%) Beyond the indicators, the program has built a pipeline of high-potential firms that adopted new technologies, accessed new markets, and in some cases began exporting. This is where the One World Bank Group approach comes in to support capability-building and de-risking through ADEPME services and matching grants, and FONGIP guarantees, while IFC helps mobilize longer-term capital and advisory support for firms ready to invest and grow, through initiatives such as AgriConnect, which supports Agri finance and agricultural value chains. What's Next for the JET Program? The restructuring and additional financing of $65 million, approved at end-2025, brings the total budget to $195 million and extends the program to December 2027. Aligned with Agenda Senegal 2050, the additional financing sharpens the program’s focus in three ways: it concentrates support on the firms in sectors and regional “poles” with the strongest job and export potential; it accelerates priority reforms to reduce the cost and complexity of starting and running a business (business registration, investment promotion, and digitization and transparency of procedures); and it deepen catalytic support to high-potential firms to preserve jobs and promote economic transformation by connecting capability-building and de-risking to scalable private solutions in partnership with the upcoming IFC Local Champions Initiative in Senegal, currently under preparation. Senegal’s JET Program experience is showing that results at scale are possible when firm support is paired with durable institutions and finance. The next step is to consolidate delivery and document what works, so this One World Bank Group, institution-building-and-capital-mobilization model can be adapted and replicated in other countries facing the same challenge: turning a thin formal sector into a pipeline of competitive, job-creating growth firms.