What ECCAS is and how it works

A community assembled from other communities

At a summit in December 1981 the Customs and Economic Union of Central African States agreed in principle to form something wider than a customs union. The treaty that followed was signed at Libreville on 18 October 1983, and the seat of the community has been there since. Its signatories were that union's own members, the members of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Angola sat as an observer and took full membership in 1999.

The Economic Commission for Africa records that the community was then inactive for several years, for want of money and because of the conflicts in the Great Lakes and the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where member states were fighting on opposite sides. In October 1999 it was formally designated one of the pillars of the African Economic Community provided for by the Abuja Treaty, and it remains one of the eight regional economic communities recognised in that role.

A revision of the founding treaty was adopted on 18 December 2019 and entered into force on 28 August 2020. The same reform gave the executive body the status of a Commission in December 2019, in place of the General Secretariat that had run the community since 1983.

What the treaty asks of it

The Commission sets out six priority areas of integration: political integration with peace and security, economic and financial integration, physical integration through infrastructure, environmental integration and rural development, social integration and human development, and the institutional reform that produced the Commission itself.

Trade is the slowest of them. A free trade area has been in effect since 2004, and the Commission describes it as a step towards a customs union with a common external tariff and a common commercial policy, which has not been reached. Physical integration runs on the Consensual Development Plan for Transport in Central Africa, fourteen priority projects covering ports, international airports, railways and the river and lake networks, meant among other things to close missing links in the trans-African corridors that run from Lagos to Mombasa and from Tripoli to Cape Town. Energy sits with the Central African Power Pool and the interconnection studies around the Inga dam on the Congo, and the forests of the Congo Basin sit with the Central African Forests Commission.

Peace and security were not part of the founding brief

A statement made on the community's behalf to the United Nations Security Council on 13 June 2018 is blunt about this: peace and security were not among the missions given to the community when it was created, and they imposed themselves after the lethargy the institution went through between 1992 and 1998, a period in which seven of its ten member states at the time were at war.

The objectives were reinforced in February 1999 with the creation of the Council for Peace and Security in Central Africa, known as COPAX, with United Nations support through the Standing Advisory Committee on Security Questions in Central Africa. The Commission's own summary dates the creation of COPAX to February 2000. Under that architecture sit the Multinational Force of Central Africa and the Early Warning Mechanism for Central Africa. The community's first peace missions were deployed in the Central African Republic between 2008 and 2013, at a strength of 2,600 personnel in 2013, before the African Union and the United Nations took the work over. The Central African convention on the control of small arms and light weapons was adopted at Kinshasa on 30 April 2010 and entered into force in March 2017.

Every member sits in another bloc as well

No member of this community belongs to it alone. Six of them are also in the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa, which each of those records dates from 25 June 1999, and those six share the Central African CFA franc. The rest issue currencies of their own: the kwanza, the Burundian franc, the Congolese franc, the Rwandan franc and the dobra. Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda are filed under the East African Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa as well. Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are in the Southern African Development Community. Every member is in the African Union and in the African Continental Free Trade Area.

The regions disagree with the name too. This catalogue files Burundi and Rwanda under East Africa and the others under Central Africa, and one member, São Tomé and Príncipe, is an island state off the coast. French is an official language in most of the membership, Portuguese in three of them, and Equatorial Guinea's record carries Spanish, French and Portuguese together. What holds the group together is a treaty rather than a compass line.

Where the edges are argued

Rwanda's cabinet, in a statement issued at Kigali on 9 June 2025, recorded the country's withdrawal from the community on 7 June 2025. The foreign ministry's statement on the same episode places it at the 26th Ordinary Summit in Malabo, and says that Rwanda's turn at the rotating chairmanship under Article 6 of the treaty was set aside there. The cabinet statement invokes Article 3 of the treaty, on good neighbourliness, and names the chairmanship held by the Democratic Republic of the Congo from February 2023 to February 2024. The Congolese account of the same events is not published alongside it, and this catalogue does not settle between the two.

The roster on this page is read from the Commission's own list of member states, which was consulted on 2 September 2026 and named Rwanda among them. So the notice is recorded here and the count is not changed by it. Where a membership is contested, this catalogue follows the organisation's published list and says plainly what is in dispute.