Strengthening Touba's International Influence: City Partnerships and Cooperation

This mission mobilizes the diaspora to increase the international influence of Touba, Senegal's second-largest city and the capital of Mouridism, which annually hosts over six million pilgrims for the Grand Magal, inscribed on the national cultural heritage list since 2025. The city has strong cooperation assets. In July 2026, the municipality of Touba Mosquée was selected among the pilot municipalities for Act 4 of decentralization, with state support for urban restructuring, access to housing, water, and sanitation. In 2025, it was chosen as a pilot municipality for a national training project for local government staff. International partners have already intervened: the Turkish agency TİKA equipped the emergency department of Ndamatou Hospital, the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) worked with the UCG on plastic waste management and a recovery center, and Matlaboul Fawzeyni Hospital was born from the mobilization of a diaspora dahira. The goal is to go further, while preserving the city's religious specificity: establish active decentralized cooperation partnerships with foreign cities (especially those with strong Mouride communities), facilitate access to international funding, promote the city's projects (water and sanitation, waste, health, mobility, education, heritage) to donors and investors, and provide technical support to the municipality in its pilot role.