Sadio Mané laid the foundation stone on Saturday, 19th September for an agro-industrial park at Bambali, the village in southern Senegal where he was born, and he is paying for all of it himself.
SM10 Agro will cost 11.7 billion CFA francs, about US$20 million, which Mané says comes entirely from his own funds. Construction is expected to take 18 months.
The plan covers 500 hectares of orchards, four processing units and capacity to handle 8,500 tonnes a year, with more than 1,000 direct jobs at start-up. A training centre and a research operation sit alongside the factories. Mangoes are the point.
Bambali sits in Moyenne-Casamance, where the trees produce heavily and a substantial part of the crop rots every year because there is nowhere to store it and nobody to sell it to. Mané intends to process the fruit into purée, dried mango and mango butter for domestic sale and export, with guava alongside it.
“I want the fruits of the land to stay here,” he said.
What separates this from what he has done before is that it is meant to make money. Mané has funded a mosque, a school, a hospital and a petrol station in Bambali over the past decade, and opened a bakery last November. He told reporters in Dakar this month that he now wants to go beyond supporting the community and start creating production, work and value in it.
He is 34 and retired from the Africa Cup of Nations after the 2025 tournament, having scored 52 goals for Senegal, more than anyone else, and provided 31 assists, also more than anyone else. He finished second in the 2022 Ballon d’Or and won the Socrates Prize the same year, awarded for social work rather than football. He played for Liverpool and Bayern Munich before moving to Saudi Arabia.