Dakar, Senegal – Twenty-four hours before health workers across Senegal were due to walk out on strike, Awa Diba went into labour. Her first child was coming into the world as hospitals prepared to limit services to emergency care. She shared a room with four other women.
Cracks ran across the ceiling. Some rooms had air conditioning; others did not. Electricity was intermittent.
Sometimes, she says, their cries were met with: “Be quiet.” Diba entered the hospital as a trainee nurse and left as a mother, carrying a healthy daughter. The experience left her feeling that the system itself was unwell. She grew up in Casamance, in southern Senegal, and studied digital communication at university in Ziguinchor.
In the first quarter of 2026, Senegal’s unemployment rate among people aged 15 to 34 was 28.4 percent, according to the country’s National Agency of Statistics and Demography (ANSD). At the end of 2024, 5,236 doctors were registered with Senegal’s National Medical Council, including 4,407 working in the public sector, according to figures provided by the council’s president. Dr Marc Manga, a member of the medical union SAMES in Ziguinchor, says the problem is not only about numbers.
Emergency care continued, while routine medical activities were disrupted. SAMES is calling for more recruitment, better career and pension conditions, and greater investment in hospitals and medical equipment, particularly outside Dakar. The union says its demands date back to 2023.
Patients wait for doctors. Doctors wait for equipment. Unions wait for promises to be honoured.
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