Diourbel Region
Diourbel's Groundnut Basin and Mouride headquarters at Touba shape religious-agricultural economy, with Agropole Centre (2025) targeting 50% peanut processing.
Diourbel anchors the northern Groundnut Basin where peanut cultivation spans over 1.2 million hectares across the agricultural heartland. The region's 19.5% cropland expansion over the past decade reflects intensification that groundwater depletion and soil degradation increasingly constrain—the productivity gains that mechanization and inputs enable creating environmental debts that future generations will pay.
The city of Touba within Diourbel region serves as headquarters for the Mouride brotherhood, one of Senegal's most influential Sufi orders, the annual Grand Magal pilgrimage drawing millions of devotees whose spending supports an informal economy organized around religious obligation. This religious centrality creates economic patterns that formal statistics poorly capture.
Agropole Centre, set to launch in 2025 with peanut and cereal processing facilities, represents the value-addition strategy that Vision 2050 promotes. Currently only 15% of peanuts are processed domestically, the raw commodity exports that the agropole aims to transform into higher-value products. Whether processing capacity translates into farmer income—or whether industrial capture concentrates benefits—tests whether agricultural transformation serves producers or merely processes their output.