20-6-2025
Senegal’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko said he was grateful to China for offering his country’s athletes scholarships after the Senegal women basketball team was refused visas by the United States of America.
The Senegal women basketball team scheduled a ten-day training tour in the US in their preparations for the 2025 Afrobasket tournament in Cote d’Ivoire, the US government rejected several members application for visas. Senegal is among 36 nations the US is considering adding to a travel ban barring entry to its territory.
Posting on Facebook, Sonko said he had been told “about the refusal to issue visas to several members of the Senegalese women’s national basketball team”.
He said he had instructed the country’s ministry of sports to “simply cancel the ten-day preparatory training”. The team will now train in Dakar.
Sonko revealed that China had awarded “several dozens of preparation scholarships to our athletes and their coaches” ahead of the 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Dakar.
Expressing his “deep gratitude to the People’s Republic of China”, Sonko said it reaffirmed his country’s “new doctrine of cooperation: free, balanced cooperation, based on mutual respect and shared benefit”.
According to Babacar Ndiaye, president of the Senegalese Basketball Federation, the United States only renewed visas for “those who held old visas and rejected new requests”.
The US State Department said it was not able to comment on individual cases, while the US embassy in Senegal did not reply to a request for comment.