Fatou Faye was not the first person to head for Spain from her run-down corner of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Half a dozen friends and relatives left before her, squeezing into wooden fishing boats and wagering their lives on the high seas for the chance of a future in Europe.

“Some succeeded,” Ms. Faye said flatly. “Some were sent back. Some drowned.”

But there was no dangerous sea voyage for Ms. Faye, a 32-year-old mother of two who came to Spain under circumstances that thousands of her compatriots can only dream of: on a plane, with a visa and a job that pays five times what she earned back home.

Ms. Faye is one of the first Senegalese workers to be hired under a Spanish labor plan that offers legal passage and a one-year work permit to some with the idea that by raising the possibility of reaching Spain legally, young Africans will be dissuaded from throwing themselves on the mercy of the Atlantic.

The program, promoted by the Spanish and Senegalese governments, aims to bring hundreds of workers to Spain this year with renewable one-year visas and jobs. Workers on one-year permits may have their contracts extended, at which point they have the right to bring over their immediate family. Ultimately, officials here say, the plan is to bring in thousands of immigrants through the program.

“I thought, ‘Thank God. I will be able to help my father and mother, my brothers and sisters,’ ” Ms. Faye said of the moment when she heard she had a job waiting for her at Acciona, a major Spanish building and cleaning company.

In January, she flew with 72 others to Spain, where Acciona helped her find the three-bedroom house she shares with four other Senegalese on the edge of this small industrial town. She now earns $960 a month after taxes, as part of a cleaning team at a ham processing factory.

As Europe struggles to cope with an unstinting flow of desperate migrants to its southern shores, Spain’s African initiative, a blend of carrots and sticks, has won praise for the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Several companies are in the process of hiring people in Dakar to come to work in Spain for a year, potentially more. Those companies include McDonald’s; Carrefour, a French retailer; and Vips, a Spanish convenience store chain.

“It’s advanced thinking in terms of migration policy,” Peter Sutherland, the United Nations special representative for migration, said in a telephone interview. “It’s trailblazing.”

Supporters of the program say they are under no illusion that it will fix Europe’s migration problem.

“When you measure the volume of people we can hire against the needs of their countries, it’s a drop in the ocean,” said Miguel Ángel García, head of human resources for Vips, which has hired 25 people from Senegal and is in the process of hiring 40 more. “But we just have to keep working, drop by drop.”

A surge in sub-Saharan migration last year to the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession that many Africans try to use as a gateway to Europe, prompted Spain to toughen its stance on immigration and, along with the rest of Europe, extend the cordon around its shores with international patrols.

This year, the number of arrivals has fallen steeply: about 6,000 migrants landed in the Canaries in the first seven months, compared to 13,000 in the same period of 2006. Spanish officials and emergency workers based in the Canaries attributed the decline to better maritime surveillance and cooperation from countries like Senegal, as well as rougher seas.

Mr. Zapatero’s immigration policy has not always drawn applause. Spain’s decision to legalize 600,000 immigrants in 2005 infuriated some European partners, who believe it encouraged a flood of migrants.

But as Europe closes its door to illegal immigrants, Spain is opening a small window of possibility. Labor Minister Jesús Caldera signed an agreement with Gambia on Wednesday to invest $1.3 million to train Gambians who could be recruited to work in Spain. In July, Spain signed similar agreements with Mali and Mauritania.

It is not just for humanitarian reasons that Spain is reaching out to African migrants. Rapid economic growth has forced companies to look abroad to cover a dearth of local labor. Thousands of migrants are hired from Eastern Europe, Morocco and Latin America each year to pick strawberries, wait tables and work in the country’s booming construction sector.

“There are parts of Spain where it’s impossible to find qualified workers,” said Juan Manuel Cruz, head of labor relations for Acciona. He said the group of Senegalese workers was “very well trained, with strong language skills” and had “a huge will to work.”

For Ms. Faye, the message behind the new Spanish labor program was clear. Senegal announced the plan after it agreed to take back hundreds of illegal Senegalese migrants from Spain in September.

When Ms. Faye boarded a Spanish government plane bound for Madrid in January, it had just returned a group of illegal Senegalese immigrants to Dakar. No migrant in Spain illegally in the past two years was considered for a job with Acciona.

“There need to be more contracts like this, more possibilities for young people to come here,” said Issa Faye, 30, no relation to Fatou. He was earning $130 a month driving a taxi in Dakar when he was recruited by Acciona to work in Torrijos, about 1,800 miles from his home.

Mr. Faye said that getting to Europe was a local obsession. He had made three unsuccessful attempts, once losing about $1,600 to an immigration agent.

“If a person has no alternative, he will board a fishing boat,” he said.

Spanish officials say the government approach to African migration squares with existing efforts to raise Spain’s profile in the region under a three-year Africa Plan unveiled in 2006. Spain has opened new embassies in Cape Verde, Mali, Niger, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, and has installed full-time diplomatic representatives in Liberia, Gambia and Sierra Leone.

“We want to completely change the parameters of Spain’s relationship with Africa,” Bernardino León Gross, secretary of state for foreign affairs, said in an interview.

Even though migration has risen to the top of the agenda, Mr. León said, Spain is trying to maintain a long view and deal with the factors that prompt migrants to leave home in the first place.

Mr. Sutherland of the United Nations said that Spain’s approach could serve as an example for Europe. “Immigration involves foreign affairs, health, economics, border affairs, all of those things,” he said. Immigration is “clearly a European problem, so the Spanish efforts have to be married into a European policy,” he said. “Europe doesn’t stop at the Pyrenees.”