Ornamental Stones: Salami Chabi Sika, the young man who is making Benin shine in the sub-regional construction industry

Three years. That’s all it took Salami Chabi Sika to make a name for himself in a sector as subtle as it is strategic: ornamental stones. From Cotonou to Porto-Novo, from Natitingou to Kara, through Lome, this young Beninese born in 1997 in Béroubouay has multiple projects for local stone-based coatings, landscaping, and decoration.

A graduate in social sciences and trained in hospitality, he is not a geologist by training. However, driven by a clear vision and a strong taste for aesthetics and architectural design, he founded Accès Service Agency in 2022, soon followed by the platform pierre-benin.com, a digital showcase of his products.

Since then, his company has carried out over a hundred projects, both in Benin and internationally, notably in Togo and Niger. Facade cladding, floor coverings, private or public space layouts … his stones feature in individual projects as well as institutions’ ones.

A high potential sector still underutilized

Benin has a significant deposit of ornamental stones including marbles, granites, quartzites, migmatites, crystallines, gravels… However, only a small part of these resources is exploited. The granites and quartzites dominate the construction market, but the other decorative rocks struggle to find buyers, due to the lack of sector structure.

This is the weakness that Accès Service tries to address. By investing in the extraction, processing, and marketing of local stones, the company aspires to make Benin an African reference in this still little explored field. For the promoter, it’s not just about business, but about heritage and local economic development.

“We have resources that deserve to be known and used at home, rather than importing expensive materials”, he often insists in his speeches.