For more than ten years, Senegal’s budget share allocated to education has increased regularly. Today, this share stands at 40%, yet the students who graduate from the education system face enormous difficulty finding jobs. In 2001, only 22.6% of the job applications from people who had graduated from middle-level education were successful; only 43% of those from secondary school leavers were, and only 27.5% from those who had graduated from higher education were successful. This state of affairs is an illustration not only of the inability of the education system to satisfy the needs of the labour market, but also of the inability of this market to identify the skills that it needs. The present study analyzed the participation in the labour market in Senegal by paying special attention to variables such as level of education, gender, area of residence, and age. It used data from the Senegal Poverty Monitoring Survey (ESPS, 2005) which used a sample of 13,600 households drawn from the entire country: 8,640 of them were urban households and 4,960 rural. The database contained about 123,600 individuals. The study examined the participation of the working-age population (between 15 and 65 years) in the labour market. To estimate this participation, the study first used a simple logit (whether there was participation or not), and then a multinomial logit for those who said they participated in the labour market (in the public and semi-public sectors, the private sector, or in self-employment). Regarding the choice of activity sector, the study’s findings show a great diversity depending on situation.