In 1972 Mali, Mauritania and Senegal founded the Organisation pour la mise en valeur du fleuve Sénégal (OMVS) to manage the river basin.

The OMVS have looked at the feasibility of creating a navigable channel 55 m (180 ft) in width between the small town of Ambidédi in Mali and Saint-Louis, a distance of 905 km (562 mi).

The Senegal's headwaters are the Semefé (Bakoye) and Bafing rivers which both originate in Guinea; they form a small part of the Guinea–Mali border before coming together at Bafoulabé in Mali.

Flowing through Boghé it reaches Richard Toll where it is joined by the Ferlo coming from inland Senegal's Lac de Guiers.

[2] In 1972 Mali, Mauritania and Senegal founded the Organisation pour la mise en valeur du fleuve Sénégal (OMVS) to manage the river basin.

The OMVS have looked at the feasibility of creating a navigable channel 55 m (180 ft) in width between the small town of Ambidédi in Mali and Saint-Louis, a distance of 905 km (562 mi).

It was visited by Hanno the Carthaginian around 450 BCE at his navigation from Carthage through the pillars of Herakles to Theon Ochema (Mount Cameroon) in the Gulf of Guinea.

In the Early Middle Ages (c. 800 CE), the Senegal River restored contact with the Mediterranean world with the establishment of the Trans-Saharan trade route between Morocco and the Ghana Empire.

Arab geographers, like al-Masudi of Baghdad (957), al-Bakri of Spain (1068) and al-Idrisi of Sicily (1154), provided some of the earliest descriptions of the Senegal River.

It was believed to be either a western branch of the Egyptian Nile River or drawn from the same source (variously conjectured to some great internal lakes of the Mountains of the Moon, or Ptolemy's Gir (Γειρ)[8] or the Biblical Gihon stream).

The Trans-Saharan stories about the "River of Gold" reached the ears of Sub-Alpine European merchants that frequented the ports of Morocco and the lure proved irresistible.

In the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300), there is a river labelled "Nilus Fluvius" drawn parallel to the coast of Africa, albeit without communication with Atlantic (it ends in a lake).

In the mappa mundi made by Pietro Vesconte for the c. 1320 atlas of Marino Sanuto, there is an unnamed river stemming from the African interior and opening in the Atlantic ocean.

[13] The portolan chart of Giovanni da Carignano (1310s-20s) has the river with the label, iste fluuis exit de nilo ubi multum aurum repperitur.

The legend of Cape Bojador as a terrifying obstacle, the 'cape of no return' to European sailors, emerged around the same time (possibly encouraged by Trans-Saharan traders who did not want to see their land route sidestepped by sea).

[15] The 1413 portolan chart of Mecia de Viladestes gives perhaps the most detailed depiction of the early state of European knowledge about the Senegal River prior to the 1440s.

And know that the greater part of those that live here occupy themselves collecting gold on the shores of the river which, at its mouth, is a league wide, and deep enough for the largest ship of the world.

[17] Curiously, there is a defiant gold-bannered town south of the river, labelled "tegezeut" (probably the Ta'adjast of al-Idrisi), and might be an ichoate reference to Djenné.

South of them (barely visible) are what seem like the towns of Kukiya (on the eastern shore of the Island of Gold), and east of that, probably Sokoto (called "Zogde" in the Catalan Atlas) and much further southeast, probably Kano.

[18] North of the Senegal-Niger are the various oases and stations of the trans-Saharan route ("Tutega" = Tijigja, "Anzica" = In-Zize, "Tegaza" = Taghaza, etc.)

From this same source also flows north the White Nile towards Egypt, which forms the frontier between the Muslim "king of Nubia" ("Rex Onubia", his range depicted by crescent-on-gold banners) and the Christian Prester John ("Preste Joha"), i.e. the emperor of Ethiopia in the garb of a Christian bishop (coincidentally, this is the first visual depiction of Prester John on a portolan chart).

Going down the coast, they turned around the al-Dakhla peninsula in the Western Sahara and emerged into an inlet, which they excitedly believed to be the mouth of the Senegal River.

Bad weather or lack of supplies prevented Tristão from actually reaching the mouth of the Senegal River, but he rushed back to Portugal to report he had finally found the "Land of the Blacks" (Terra dos Negros), and that the "Nile" was surely nearby.

[22] Cadamosto relates the legend that both the Senegal and the Egyptian Nile were branches of the Biblical Gihon River that stems from the Garden of Eden and flows through Ethiopia.

[26] However, the contemporary African atlas of Venetian cartographer Livio Sanuto, published in 1588, sketches the Senegal, the Niger and the Gambia as three separate, parallel rivers.

[31] The confusion may have arisen because Cadamosto says the Portuguese interacted frequently with a certain Wolof chieftain south of the river, somewhere on the Grande Côte, which he refers to as Budomel.

[32] "Budomel" is almost certainly a reference to the ruler of Cayor, a combination of his formal title ("Damel"), prefixed by the generic Wolof term bor ("lord").

More recent historians suggest the name "Senegal" is probably a derivation of Azenegue, the Portuguese term for the Saharan Berber Zenaga people that lived north of it.