The National Agency for the Promotion of Youth Employment (ANPEJ) has launched a three-day workshop dedicated to gathering information for a complete overhaul of the Employment Market Information System (SIME). This initiative aims to provide Senegal with a modern, reliable, and integrated tool to better guide public employment policies, particularly those benefiting young people.

Presiding over the opening ceremony on behalf of the Director General of ANPEJ, the institution's Secretary General, Emmanuel Diedhiou, recalled the magnitude of the challenge of youth employment in a country where this segment constitutes the largest and most dynamic component of the population.

"The issue of youth employment is a cross-cutting, serious and pressing issue for our developing countries," he said, stressing ANPEJ's desire to be more than just an administration: "a technical arm of the State" capable of uniting all the actors in the ecosystem around a common vision.

According to him, the success of this reform necessarily depends on close collaboration between public institutions, employment support structures, technical and financial partners, and the private sector. "It is pointless to have multiple areas of focus and multiple statistics for a single state," he insisted, advocating for an integrated system that offers young people a single point of entry to training, support, financing, and job placement opportunities.

Thus, their objective is to build a robust system capable of producing reliable and up-to-date data on the labor market in order to facilitate decision-making and the development of effective public policies.

For his part, Oumar Fall, Director of Information Systems and Dissemination, welcomed an initiative that is fully in line with the dynamic of modernizing the governance of the employment market.

"The quality of public decisions depends largely on the quality of the data on which they are based," he reminded, highlighting the strategic role of the future SIME.

According to him, this system will notably allow for a better understanding of labor market trends, anticipation of skills needs, support for companies in their recruitment efforts, and improved management of employment and vocational training policies.

The workshop benefits from the technical and financial support of the World Bank and the National Agency for Statistics and Demography (ANSD) through the Project for the Harmonization and Improvement of Statistics in West and Central Africa (PHASAOC).

For the organizers, this approach also aims to strengthen data interoperability and promote smooth information sharing between the different structures involved in managing the job market.

At the end of the three days of work, ANPEJ hopes to gather the best technical and technological proposals in order to bring about a high-performing, sustainable "SIME 2" adapted to the needs of end users.

"We want an integrated system, capable of meeting the expectations of job seekers, especially young people, and which bears the imprint of Senegalese expertise," assured Emmanuel Diedhiou, convinced that pooling skills will help to meet one of the major challenges of Senegal's economic and social development.