Digital Senegal For Inclusive Growth

Senegal, like all African countries, needs better and more jobs for its growing population. The main message of Digital Senegal for Inclusive Growth is that broader use of productivity-enhancing technologies by households and enterprises can generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. Adoption of better technologies can support both Senegal’s short-term objective of economic recovery and its vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. But this is not automatic. This book leverages a novel survey instrument that measures adoption of technologies at the firm level. Results from this survey show that there is a large average technological gap in Senegal relative to firms in Brazil, in the range of 36 and 30 percent for extensive (whether firms use it at all) and intensive (the most frequently applied) uses of better technologies such as for business administration. Except for a small number of firms, enterprises still mostly use manual, analog technologies to perform general and sector specific business functions. Micro-size informal enterprises lag even further. The benefits from technology adoption are significant. Digital technologies are an enabler of economy-wide productivity and jobs growth by catalyzing adoption of complementary technologies, including many not accessible without digital infrastructure. For households, mobile internet coverage is associated with 14 percent higher total consumption, as well as a 10 percent lower extreme poverty rate—and jobs with higher earnings. Firms with better technologies have higher levels of productivity, generate more jobs, and increase the share of lower-skilled workers on their payroll, on average: an increase in technological sophistication across general business functions that the firm uses most intensively, such as using standard software rather than writing by hand for business administration, is associated with a 14 percent higher jobs growth rate. For these and other inclusive growth benefits to be realized, Senegal should focus on ensuring availability of affordable digital infrastructure and implementing targeted incentives to promote use by firms of better technologies as well as policies to narrow deepening digital divides across enterprises and households.

The paper examines Senegal’s growth performance from the perspective of its povertyreducing and distributional characteristics, and discusses policies that might help make growth more inclusive. The main findings are that poverty has fallen in the last two decades, but poverty reduction has slowed in recent years. Although available indicators sometimes give conflicting signals on distributional shifts, people in the middle of the income distribution have received the most benefit, mainly in urban areas. Further progress in poverty reduction and inclusiveness would require sustained high growth and exploration of growth opportunities in the sectors with high earning potential for the poor. Better-targeted social policies and more attention to the regional distribution of spending would also help reduce poverty and improve inclusiveness.

Senegal’s growth has been sluggish in recent years with implications for poverty reduction. Average growth was relatively strong in 1995–2005 and accompanied by a large drop in poverty incidence. Due partly to a series of exogenous shocks, growth decreased to an average of 3.3 percent in 2006–11. As a result, per capita income increased only modestly and poverty incidence barely decreased during this period and remains high.

Senegal’s growth has been sluggish in recent years with implications for poverty reduction. Average growth was relatively strong in 1995–2005 and accompanied by a large drop in poverty incidence. Due partly to a series of exogenous shocks, growth decreased to an average of 3.3 percent in 2006–11. As a result, per capita income increased only modestly and poverty incidence barely decreased during this period and remains high.

All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, broader use can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of country populations averaged across Sub-Saharan Africa, but only 22 percent use such services. The average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers, as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: the affordability of these new technologies and the willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small and medium businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skill-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty across Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.

Economic transformation and diversification require solutions that take account of the political economy of reform. This book explores the process of economic transformation, using Senegal as an example. Sound macroeconomic and fiscal policies are prerequisites for achieving this kind of transformation, but these policies need to include the appropriate industrial policies and good economic governance, which provide incentives to help small- and medium-sized enterprises emerge from the informal sector and for foreign direct investment to use the country as a platform for globally competitive production. In many low-income countries extensive rent seeking and patronage have generated stability at the expense of inclusive growth and held back development. Although policymakers know what is needed to address these problems and achieve economic transformation and diversification, how to do it remains a challenge. This book shows how the political economy of reform may be navigated to achieve transformation. For example, the use of special economic zones may solve the problem if good global governance is emphasized, along with linking the zones to the global economy.

An entrepreneurial ecosystem is characterized by the structure and interactions of organizations, firms, institutions, and individuals in a specific locale that is conducive to entrepreneurship. It can be defined as a set of interdependent actors and factors that are governed in such a way that they enable productive entrepreneurship in a particular territory. The World Bank has developed a new toolkit, Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Digital Businesses and Beyond, for entrepreneurial ecosystem assessments, including dedicated methodologies and data sets, to nurture digital entrepreneurship. This toolkit builds on the World Bank’s expertise in collecting and analyzing firm-level data, assessing the quality and efficiency of policies that support innovation and small and medium enterprises, and deriving insights from spatial economics to inform subnational analysis. The toolkit consists of six modules: cross-country context analysis, assessing local entrepreneurial ecosystems, digital entrepreneurship and tech start-ups, mapping public programs and intermediary organizations, digital market regulations, and policy options to support entrepreneurial ecosystems.