After a first mission in Tunisia, WAW Secretariat has achieved an exploratory mission in Senegal (2-7 march 2015) following an official request from the Ministry in charge of Agriculture (MAER, ministère de l’Agriculture et de l’équipement rural), in order to define how Senegal could strengthen its capacity to better define its agricultural holdings and their ongoing transformations in order to improve the policy dialogue.

A set of bilateral meetings were held with  DAPSA (Direction de l’analyse de la prévision et des statistiques agricoles), ANSD (Agence Nationale des statistiques et de la Démographie), IPAR (Initiative de prospective agricole et rurale), ISRA/BAME (Institut sénégalais de recherche agricole), CNCR (Conseil national de coopération et de coordination des ruraux), FONGS (Fédération des ONGs du Sénégal), and CIRAD (Centre de coopération international pour la recherche agricole pour le développement).  These meetings led to developing a great interest to develop a collaborative process aiming at defining a national typology of agricultural holdings in Senegal, taking advantages of (1) the works achieved by IPAR and CNCR, which developed a database on the monitoring of 2000 family farms in Senegal and (2) the launching of a new Agricultural Census in Senegal, with the technical support of FAO.

Based on an official request formulated by the Ministers of Agriculture of Senegal and Tunisia, a project proposal has been drafted, discussed with Partners, and pre-agreed by the FAO TC Department. A Task Force has been set up, and the final approval process should be achieved by the end of July.