Senegal

Starting a Business in

Senegal

Listed below is a detailed summary of the bureaucratic and legal hurdles an entrepreneur must overcome in order to incorporate and register a new firm, along with their associated time and set-up costs.  It examines the procedures, time and cost involved in launching a commercial or industrial firm with up to 50 employees and start-up capital of 10 times the economy's per-capita gross national income (GNI).

The information appearing on this page was collected as part of the Doing Business project, which measures and compares regulations relevant to the life cycle of a small- to medium-sized domestic business in 183 economies. The most recent round of data collection for the project was completed in June 2011.

  • Standardized Company

  • Legal Form: Société à Responsabilité Limitée (SARL) - Limited Liability Company
  • City: Dakar

About This Topic

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No. Procedure Time to Complete Associated Costs
1 Deposit the founding capital with a bank

The company can deposit the founding capital with a bank directly or through a public notary.
1 day included in the following procedure
2 Notarize company bylaws and bank deposit of subscribed capital

A public notary is required to notarize company bylaws and deposit subscribed capital at a bank. The procedure takes 3 days if the notary public prepares the articles of association and a day if notary only signs. The involvement of the notary is required.

The statutes can be drafted either by notarial act or by any other act, provided that the authorized signatures are notarized. If by notarial act, the notary must (a) establish the statutes (if the promoter has not done so) and issue the declaration of conformity (déclaration de régularité et de conformité); and (b) register the statutes and declare the existence of the company with the tax authorities.

The promoter may ask the notary to complete additional formalities, such as commercial registration at the court to obtain the company identification number (numéro d'identification nationale des entreprises et des associations, NINEA).

In practice the estimates varied from 250.000 to 305.000. The cost varies here, because the fee varies depending on the services delivered.

 2 days XOF 250,000 -305,000
3 Register your business at the one-stop shop

Since November 2007, entrepreneurs can register at the one-stop shop which takes care of what was formerly done in seven different procedures.

Four of the procedures are taken care of by having the four relevant agencies dispatch one of their civil servants to the one-stop shop. This is:
- The tax authority to register the bylaws;
- The Commercial Registry (‘Registre du Commerce et du Credit Mobilier’ – RCCM) to register the company bylaws;
- The NINEA to get a company identification number (‘Numéro d’Identification National des Entreprises et des Associations’) ; and,
- The Labor authority to register workers and commencement of operation.

They are all physically located in the same location and there is a timesheet kept by the coordinator of the one-stop shop that indicates the precise time with which every person in the room delivers the document.

Another two procedures are handled by the one-stop shop, and these are:
- Registration at the Social Security (‘Caisse de Securite Sociale’ - CSS);
- Registration at the Pension Fund (‘Institut de Prevoyance Retraite’ – IPRES).

These two agencies are not physically located inside the one-stop shop but are a few minutes away. What is done is that when a new file comes in, the coordinator of the one-stop shop, sends the information about the application by email to these two agencies. He then phones them to make sure that they received the email. Later in the afternoon (or if it afternoon, the next day), the one-stop shop sends a courrier to go and fetch the approved documents.

Fees, for firms with a capital lower than 10 00 000 F CFA, the applicant needs to pay :
- Registration fees : 27 000 FCFA ( 25 000 for the statutes and 2 000 for the subscription declaration)
- Court Registrar fees : 30 090 FCFA , if the capital is 1 000 000 + 90 F CFA for any other 1 000 000, in the Doing Business case study, the capital is between 3 and 4 millions therefore : 30 270 FCFA


 2 days 25 000 XOF + 2 000 XOF+ 30 090 XOF+ 90*3 XOF
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