Geneva · Kaolack department, Senegal
Learning to bake bread with the grains that grow here.
Kaolack grows millet and sorghum, and buys the flour for its bread abroad. A centre there will train young people to bake with the department’s own grains: a trade, and a supply chain that stays local. The idea did not come from Geneva. It came from Kaolack.
Geneva · 28 August 2026
Did a bottle bring you here?
Then you have already done something. The bissap and the ginger juice are sold in Geneva for the benefit of this project: every bottle goes towards training young bakers in Kaolack. Drinking it, giving it, talking about it: all of that helps, and all of it is possible today.
Geneva · 28 August 2026
“Sunu Mbourou” means “our bread” in Wolof.
The project was given its name in August 2026; a Geneva pastry chef piped it in chocolate on the day this picture was taken.
Local grains
80%
Millet, maize and sorghum, grown in the department
Imported wheat
20%
Today’s bread depends on it almost entirely
2026Project description, Kaolack Departmental Council
Why this project, and why there
Five findings that add up to one
None of these findings are ours. Every one of them is written down, in black and white, in the development plan the department drew up for itself. The quotations are our translation.
- 01
The department grows grain
Millet, maize, sorghum, groundnut, rice, cassava, cowpea. In a single season: sixty thousand tonnes of millet, forty-four thousand of maize, fifteen thousand of sorghum.
- 02
But it processes little, and struggles to sell what it does process
The plan acknowledges a few processing units, then names what is missing: a way to keep the produce, and an outlet for what has been processed.
“problem of marketing processed agricultural products”
- 03
Staple foods come from somewhere else
The department’s wholesalers buy basic foodstuffs straight from importers. So the processing work, and the money it brings in, happens somewhere else too.
- 04
And nobody trains people in the artisanal trades
The department says so itself, twice in the same list of what it lacks.
“Absence of training centres for the artisanal trades”
- 05
Young people have neither jobs nor financing
The average age is twenty-three. The plan speaks of a “high rate of youth unemployment” and of “difficulty accessing financing”.
“high rate of youth unemployment”
The missing link
A bakery school built onto the grain supply chain is three things at once: a training centre for a trade with a future, an agricultural processing unit, and a source of jobs.
Absence of training centres for the artisanal trades
The productive sectors, and those that support production, suffer from enormous problems, linked on the one hand to the rudimentary practices of those involved and on the other to their lack of supervision.
Illustration
Sorghum. The department already grows it, and does not yet process it.
What the project sets up
Three components that fund each other
The second one comes as a surprise, and it is the one that holds the rest up: the school restaurant earns the money that keeps the training alive.
- 01
Baking and food processing
Training centre
A dual approach (theory, practice, work placement) organised in eight modules, from the craft of bread-making to equipment maintenance. The training focuses on processing the grains grown locally.
- 02
School-enterprise
Poultry restaurant
A unit that is both educational and economic: it trains people in catering and in processing poultry products, and it earns the income that keeps the centre running. This is the component that makes the whole thing last without a permanent subsidy.
- 03
Agroecological production
Market garden and orchard
The upstream link: growing part of the inputs on site, training people in agroecological practices, and diversifying the site’s income.
The project in four figures
What it aims for
The territory
Kaolack, crossroads of the Sine Saloum
The project is led by the authority that runs the department, with an elected council of 80 members.
Who carries the project
Each in their place
The project is run in Kaolack by the Departmental Council and the four communes that make up the Naatal Kaolack grouping, together with Geneva’s artisan bakers. A Geneva association is being set up to support it from Switzerland: to make the project known, and to raise funds.
Each does what it knows how to do, where it is. Nothing is decided in Geneva on Kaolack’s behalf.
Sunu Mbourou