From street trading to the “zero sand” challenge September 15, 2026

Born in 1988 in Nganda, in the Kaffrine region, entrepreneur Talla Loum left school in third grade in 2006, before heading to Dakar to become a street vendor. Today at the head of Loumen Business Group, a company specializing in cleaning, his ambition is to help make the Senegalese capital, Dakar, cleaner and to offer young people reasons to believe in their country.

There is, in the career of Talla Loum, founder and current CEO of Loumen Business Group, a succession of turns that could have shattered an ambition. On the contrary, he made them the stages of an ascent. Born in 1988 in Nganda, in the Kaffrine region, he grew up in a family of farmers. He attended the primary school in his commune before continuing his studies at the Babacar Kobar Ndaw high school in Kaffrine. Arriving in third grade in 2006, he failed at the Bfem. This is how a first turning point takes place in his life. The young Saloum-Saloum then takes the radical decision not only to leave school, but above all to go into exile in Dakar, as if to thumb his nose at this failure and the environment in which it occurred. “After this failure, I dropped out of school and came to Dakar to be a street vendor,” he says.

For more than a decade, from 2007 to 2019, commerce, particularly itinerant commerce, became his daily life. He walks the streets and neighborhoods of the capital, his pack on his shoulders. A grueling activity, but one whose arduousness he learns to put into perspective. “When you are the son of a farmer, being a street vendor is not hard for you, because you are used to carrying heavy loads,” he says. However, behind the street vendor there is already a man who dreams of something else. So, in 2019, the desire for elsewhere ends up overwhelming Talla, who succumbs to the temptation of illegal emigration. He tries his luck in Morocco to reach Europe by sea. But this adventure, which constitutes a second turning point in his life, comes to an end. In Tangier, Talla is arrested. Transferred to Fez, then to Nador, he spent fifteen days in detention in a Moroccan prison before being returned to Senegal.

Learn while walking

But at this difficult moment, when everything is going wrong, Talla, always true to himself, chooses to respond to adversity with humor. During repatriation, in fact, agents ask migrants to provide their identity. “There were some who said Massamba, others Moustapha. I stayed a while and I told them: My name is Macky Sall,” he says, cheerfully. The joke provokes mockery from other migrants and agents, who say to him: “But you, the President of the Republic, what are you looking for here? Instead of leading your country, you take the migration routes,” Talla recalls. However, it was ironically during this ordeal that the trigger occurred. Talla Loum returns to Dakar with a firm conviction: he will never leave again. For him, success must now be built in Senegal. He resumes his activity at the market. Then, one day, a question crossed his mind: “I sat down and said to myself: why not me, start a business? “, he said. This question becomes the starting point of a new life.

Talla then goes to the Apix offices to find out about administrative procedures. This is where a chance meeting will help seal his destiny as an entrepreneur. “God made it so that I met a guy there. We talked, I showed him my Ninea, because in 2008, I had created a trading company just to be able to get a visa and travel. He told me he worked in cleaning. When examining my documents, he pointed out to me that I was missing a lot of things for the creation of my company, such as the name of the company, the Tcsa (municipal tax on the status of activities), etc. “, he recalls.

So, inspired by this exchange and armed with this advice, Talla Loum immediately took the necessary steps and also officially created his cleaning company: Loumen Business Group. He then took the initiative of writing his letters himself and going around the ministries to submit them. It was then that a discovery challenged him about his new status. His requests are now processed and responses are sent directly to him as general manager. “I noticed that when departments wrote to me in return after a few requests, they wrote to me as general director. I said to myself: Ah! That’s something! The traveling salesman that I am is now general manager,” he says, smiling. This detail becomes a source of motivation for him.

Birth of Loumen Business

In the process, the very young entrepreneur discovered in “Le Soleil”, he said, the announcement of a cleaning contract with the National Sanitation Office of Senegal (Onas). This was his first real test. He buys the specifications, fills them out and submits his file. But upon examination, the verdict is clear: almost everything is missing. “I had no discharge, no Ipres, no Social Security Fund, no certificate of non-bankruptcy. I had nothing. I only had the commercial register,” he learns. But instead of seeing this failure as an end, he turns it into accelerated training. He returns to get the documents he is missing, regularizes his situation and prepares for the next opportunity.

This comes with the Public Infrastructure Management Company for the urban centers of Diamniadio and Lac Rose (Sogip SA). The structure is launching a cleaning contract for its headquarters and the Arena Stadium. Talla Loum applies. To his great surprise, he gets a prize. It is 2023. For him, this market constitutes the true birth certificate of Loumen Business Group. “This is the second time I participated in a market and I won,” he rejoices.
Today, his individual business is growing. It is involved in office cleaning, but also in end-of-construction cleaning. She collaborates with several structures, including Sogip, Kilimane Entreprise, the Olympique Club and other partners. Depending on needs, Loumen Business Group can mobilize up to fifty people.

But Talla Loum does not want to stop there. Its ambition is now to move from cleaning buildings to more global action on urban cleanliness. “In other countries I have seen, it is very clean. In our country, when you walk in the streets, there is sand everywhere. It hurts me,” he remarks.
From this observation was born his project idea “Zero sand on tar in Dakar”. The objective is to set up a regular cleaning system for the capital’s main roads in order to prevent sand from gradually covering the asphalt and transforming the roads into permanent sources of dust. With the Youth Olympic Games approaching in particular, the entrepreneur believes that Dakar must be able to offer a cleaner image to visitors. “I don’t want foreigners to come and see our country with all this sand on the tar,” wishes Talla Loum.

The dream of a cleaner capital

He thus dreams of presenting his project to the President of the Republic and obtaining support from the State. “If the President could receive us so that we can launch this “Anti-sand” project in Dakar…” he wishes.

Behind this proposal, there is an entrepreneurial ambition, but also a form of economic patriotism, because, for Talla, young people must be at the heart of the country’s transformation. “No one will come and work for us in our country. It is only us, the youth, who can manage it,” he believes.

For this father, married to two wives and father of three daughters, the message addressed to young people is clear: the future is being written here. By transforming his journey from failed exile into a success story of social entrepreneurship, Talla Loum wishes to demonstrate that resilience and civic engagement can clean up not only the streets of Dakar, but also the national economic landscape.

By Souleymane WANE (text) and Omar SAMB (photo)