What ECOWAS is and how it works

The name, and the languages it comes in

CEDEAO is the acronym in French and in Portuguese alike, and the Community prints both sets of letters in its own material. Article 87 of the revised treaty names English, French and Portuguese as the working languages, and makes official all West African languages so designated by the Authority as well as those three. The member records carry the working three as state languages and a few more beside them: Cape Verdean Creole in Cape Verde, Krio in Sierra Leone, and Badyara, Balanta and Wolof in Senegal.

Lagos, then Cotonou

The Treaty of Lagos was signed on 28 May 1975. Cape Verde was not among the signatories and its record dates its accession to 1977. The revised treaty replacing it was done at Cotonou on 24 July 1993, and it moved the target from a common market to an economic union. Article 3 lists the parts: a free trade area built by abolishing customs duties and non-tariff barriers between members, a common external tariff and a common trade policy toward everyone else, the removal of obstacles to the movement of persons, goods, services and capital, and a monetary union. Article 86 places the headquarters in the capital of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and names no city.

The right to enter

Protocol A/P.1/5/79, done at Dakar on 29 May 1979, is the part of the arrangement that reaches a traveller rather than a ministry. Article 2 gives Community citizens the right to enter, reside and establish, to be built in three phases across a transitional period of at most fifteen years: right of entry and abolition of visa, then right of residence, then right of establishment.

Article 3 is the phase that took. A citizen of one member visiting another for ninety days or fewer enters at an official post without a visa, on a valid travel document and an international health certificate, and needs permission from the host authority to stay past the ninetieth day. Article 4 leaves each member the right to refuse anyone its own law treats as an inadmissible immigrant. Residence and establishment were left to later supplementary protocols and are not carried by the ninety-day rule.

One tariff, and a currency that has not arrived

The common external tariff runs in five bands, at 0, 5, 10, 20 and 35%, adopted on 25 October 2013 and applied from January 2015. Four of those bands were already in use by the West African Economic and Monetary Union, whose members inside this group are Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Togo; the fifth band was added for goods named for economic development. Those five countries use the West African CFA franc, and Guinea-Bissau's record still carries the peso beside it. The rest issue their own money, and Liberia's record lists the United States dollar alongside the Liberian one.

A shared currency has been agreed under several names and no notes have been printed. The West African Monetary Zone was set up by the Accra Declaration of April 2000 for members outside the franc zone. The Authority adopted the name eco at Abuja on 29 June 2019. The launch has been set for 2003, for 2005, for 2010, for 2015 and for 2020, and the roadmap in force now points at 2027.

What the Community did with soldiers

The Protocol on Mutual Assistance on Defence was signed at Freetown on 29 May 1981. The Standing Mediation Committee met at Banjul on 6 and 7 August 1990 and created a Ceasefire Monitoring Group, ECOMOG, whose first contingent landed in Liberia on 24 August 1990. Forces followed to Sierra Leone in 1997 and to Guinea-Bissau in 1999. Adama Barrow was sworn in as president of the Gambia at the Gambian embassy in Dakar on 19 January 2017, troops crossed the border the same day, and Yahya Jammeh left the country on 21 January.

Protocol A/SP1/12/01 on Democracy and Good Governance, adopted at Dakar on 21 December 2001, wrote the conditions down. Its constitutional convergence principles include zero tolerance for power obtained or maintained by unconstitutional means, and a bar on substantial amendment of the electoral law in the six months before an election without the agreement of a majority of political actors.

Article 91, and the states that used it

Leaving has a written procedure. Article 91 requires a member that wishes to withdraw to give the Executive Secretary one year's notice in writing, and it binds that member to every treaty obligation for the whole of the year; if the notice still stands at the end of it, the state ceases to be a member.

Mauritania signed at Lagos in 1975 and withdrew with effect from December 2000, and an association agreement followed in August 2017. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger gave joint notice on 28 January 2024 and ceased to be members on 29 January 2025, the day the year ran out. The Commission stated that until further notice the citizens of the three keep the right of movement, residence and establishment without visas, that identity cards and passports bearing the ECOWAS emblem are still recognised, and that their goods and services are still handled under the Trade Liberalisation Scheme. The heads of state and government left the door open for six months.

Where the edges are argued

A seat here is a treaty status rather than a position on the map, and the two have come apart. The three departing states are still in West Africa on every geographical reading, still inside the monetary union, still using the CFA franc, and they have built the Alliance of Sahel States, which became a confederation on 6 July 2024. Mauritania is filed by this catalogue under the Maghreb and was a founding signatory all the same.

The Community's own pages disagree with each other about the roster. Read on 2 September 2026, the basic information page described fifteen member countries and the member states page listed 12. This hub follows the second, because the members are read off the country records and the country records follow ratification.