Senegal group pitches economic intelligence as a matter of national sovereignty

“Whoever masters information need not endure the future; they prepare for it.” The line belongs to Amadou Cissé, president of the Senegalese Association for Economic Intelligence (ASIE). It sums up the roadmap the Dakar-based group unveiled on Sunday, October 18, on the tech news site Socialnetlink, and the roadmap boils down to one idea: monitoring, gathering and protecting strategic information should stop being the preserve of a few specialists and become a skill the country organises.

Monitoring, influence and economic security

ASIE is a non-profit association registered in the Ngor Diarama neighbourhood of Dakar. Its president is described as an economic intelligence expert and strategic analyst. The group stresses that it has no ties to any political party, and lists sovereignty and “economic patriotism” among its values. Its 2026 programme carries a blunt title: “Making the most of economic intelligence for a prosperous Senegal.”

The discipline, as the association describes it, rests on three pillars. Monitoring means tracking markets and competitors continuously. Influence means defending one’s interests wherever economic and regulatory rules are set. Economic security protects what an organisation owns, physical assets as well as intangible ones such as know-how, processes and data. ASIE applies that framework to four national issues: getting more value from natural resources, digital transformation, cybersecurity and access to regional markets.

In practice, it promises training courses, professional workshops, conferences and strategic analysis, along with efforts to make organisations more careful about protecting their data and know-how. It wants to bring together analysts and intelligence watchers, consultants, cybersecurity specialists, business lawyers, executives and academics, and says it intends to feed into discussions on a national framework, institutional, legal and educational, for the practice of economic intelligence.

Plenty of intent, few specifics

The presentation leaves several questions open. No date is given for a first training session or conference. The association has not disclosed how many members it has, nor when it was founded. No ministry, university or company is named as a partner, and ASIE makes no specific request of the state, whether for a dedicated agency or a public policy.

Sensitive data, a 2008 law

Digital policy is where the group’s message meets the government’s agenda most directly. Launched on February 24, 2025 in Diamniadio by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the New Deal technologique, a 1,105 billion CFA franc plan (about €1.7 billion), makes digital sovereignty its first pillar, with data protection and the resilience of strategic infrastructure among its goals.

Yet the text governing that data is still Law No. 2008-12 of January 25, 2008. Its overhaul, cleared by the Supreme Court in 2022, was still the subject of a finalisation workshop run by the Personal Data Protection Commission in October 2024. In March, Saïkou Fall, a cybersecurity and AI governance expert, told the Senegalese Press Agency that the law had become “obsolete” in light of today’s digital challenges, while noting that a new bill was reportedly “already in the pipeline.” No adoption has been announced since.