New Borg El Arab, Alexandria
Egypt inaugurated the new headquarters of Senghor University in New Borg El Arab City on Saturday, opening a campus designed to train French-speaking African leaders capable of driving sustainable development across the continent.
The university takes its name from Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese poet, cultural theorist and statesman who served as the first president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980.
Senghor co-founded the Négritude movement with Aimé Césaire, promoting distinctly African cultural values and aesthetics in opposition to the influence of French colonialism.
In 1984, he became the first African inducted into the Académie française. A university bearing his name, training African leaders in French, carries the full weight of that legacy.
Speaking at the inauguration, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sissi described the university as “a premier academic institution dedicated to empowering young African talent.”
He added that it cultivates “the expertise necessary to address the continent’s developmental challenges, transforming them into viable opportunities for achieving the envisioned sustainable growth.”
Founded more than three decades ago, Senghor University operates with a focused mandate to train, in French, creative leaders capable of meeting the challenges of sustainable development in Africa.
El-Sissi said the university’s work extends beyond instruction, covering institutional capacity building and the training of decision-makers in governance, resource management, water and food security, and climate change adaptation.
Egypt allocated the land for the new campus and contributed significant funding toward its construction.
The project, completed ahead of schedule, doubled the university’s enrollment capacity. El-Sissi said Egypt would continue to allocate annual scholarships for African students.
“The future of our African continent rests upon the empowerment of its youth, the cultivation of its human resources, and the consolidation of its institutional capacities,” El-Sissi said.
The new campus represents a joint investment by Egypt and the International Organization of La Francophonie, whose member states include more than 30 African countries.
El-Sissi presided over the ceremony alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, OIF Secretary-General Louise Mushikiwabo, Burundian Prime Minister Nestor Ntahontuye, Senegalese Foreign Minister Cheikh Niang, and African Union Commissioner for Education, Science, Technology and Innovation Gaspard Banyankimbona.
