The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Confederation of Sahel States (AES) have agreed to establish joint working groups to negotiate their future relationship, as the two blocs seek to reconcile a political separation with economic ties that remain deeply entrenched.
At a ministerial meeting in Dakar on October 17, the two sides agreed that the groups would conduct technical negotiations towards a framework co-operation agreement. Their conclusions will be submitted to ministers before another meeting, whose date and venue have yet to be decided.
Senegal’s foreign ministry described the talks as the first foreign minister-level meeting between ECOWAS and the AES since Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, all led by military governments, formally withdrew from the regional bloc on January 29, 2025, reducing its membership from 15 countries to 12.
Burkina Faso Foreign Minister Karamoko Jean-Marie Traoré, who chairs the AES Ministerial Steering Committee, led the confederation’s delegation. Senegal’s Minister of African Integration, Foreign Affairs and Senegalese Abroad, Cheikh Niang, represented ECOWAS as president of its Council of Ministers. The two co-chaired the session.
The agreement moves a process begun in Bamako on May 22, 2025 onto a more structured negotiating track. At those earlier consultations, AES foreign ministers and then-ECOWAS Commission President Omar Alieu Touray adopted conclusions intended to manage the consequences of withdrawal. Both sides agreed that existing integration gains, particularly the movement of people and goods, should be preserved pending new arrangements.
The political rupture has since become an established fact. Its economic consequences remain less easily settled. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have left ECOWAS, but their principal trade corridors, monetary arrangements and security interests still bind them to neighbouring member states.
A separation without an economic clean break
When the withdrawals took effect, ECOWAS instructed its remaining members to continue recognising travel documents bearing the bloc’s logo and preserve visa-free movement, residence and establishment rights for citizens of the three departing countries.
Goods and services from the AES states were also to retain treatment under the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme and investment policy until the bloc’s heads of state and government determined the terms of future engagement.
Those interim measures have allowed important elements of regional integration to survive the political split. They have not, however, settled the longer-term legal position of businesses, traders or citizens who depend on cross-border rights.
At an extraordinary Council of Ministers meeting in Accra in April 2025, ECOWAS identified five areas requiring contingency planning: legal and institutional arrangements, market access and economic integration, peace and security, sectoral development programmes, and human development, including education and health.
The October 17 Dakar communiqué does not replace the transitional framework. Instead, the working groups are expected to develop the technical basis for a more durable arrangement.
For businesses, the eventual agreement will matter less for its diplomatic language than for its treatment of customs procedures, transit rights, market access and the ability of people to work, live and establish companies across borders.
Coastal corridors remain indispensable
Geography gives the negotiations immediate commercial significance. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are landlocked, and much of their international trade depends on ports and transport infrastructure controlled by their coastal neighbours.
World Bank studies identify Lomé in Togo, Tema in Ghana and Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire as Burkina Faso’s three main maritime gateways. The bank is also financing the Lomé–Ouagadougou–Niamey Economic Corridor Project, whose corridor buffer zone extends approximately 1,065 kilometres.
In a June 2026 assessment, the African Development Bank identified Benin and Togo as important maritime outlets for the landlocked Sahel economies, with transit traffic contributing significantly to activity at Lomé and Cotonou.
Security conditions have made those connections more complicated. Insecurity in western Niger and eastern Burkina Faso has pushed some transport operators towards alternative routes, according to the bank, increasing pressure on other sections of the regional road network.
For Niger, the Cotonou–Niamey corridor has historically offered a principal route to the coast, while Lomé provides an alternative through Burkina Faso. UN Trade and Development has documented bottlenecks along both the Cotonou–Niamey and Lomé–Ouagadougou corridors, including poor roads, inefficient border procedures and port-management constraints.
Diplomatic disputes can compound those physical obstacles. In June 2026, Benin and Niger established expert committees to examine conditions for reopening their common border. The committees subsequently reported to their respective heads of state and undertook joint work on the requirements for restoring crossings.
Mali’s economic dependence on its coastal neighbours is particularly evident in its relationship with Senegal. Senegalese statistics show Mali accounted for more than 55% of the country’s exports to African destinations in 2024, making it Senegal’s largest African export market in the year before Mali left ECOWAS.
The vulnerability of those commercial links became apparent during Mali’s 2025 fuel crisis. Reuters reported that al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) imposed a blockade on fuel imports from neighbouring countries, including Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, and attacked supply convoys, contributing to severe shortages.
IntelliNews reported that attacks along the Kayes and southern supply corridors threatened the transport routes feeding Bamako, exposing the capital’s reliance on road connections through neighbouring countries.
Fuel trade came under pressure again in September 2026, when Ghana’s state-owned BOST Energies reduced diesel and petrol exports to Burkina Faso and Mali while managing domestic supply requirements, Reuters reported.
Burkina Faso received about 40,000 tonnes from BOST against requests totalling 80,000 tonnes for July and August. Mali received 10,000 tonnes while seeking a further 40,000 tonnes for August and September, according to figures BOST managing director Afetsi Awoonor provided to Reuters.
Awoonor said the company was managing exports to protect Ghanaian supply. BOST subsequently disputed suggestions of an imminent domestic shortage and attributed much of the reduction to revamp works at its Bolgatanga depot, a major distribution gateway to the Sahel.
The episodes illustrate how exposed landlocked economies remain to conditions beyond their borders. A political break with ECOWAS cannot readily replace coastal ports, storage depots or the roads connecting them to inland markets.
A common currency complicates the split
The three AES governments have also retained an institutional connection that extends beyond trade agreements.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger remain members of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), alongside Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Togo.
All eight use the CFA franc, issued by the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO).
The arrangement places countries on opposite sides of the ECOWAS–AES divide within the same monetary union. Senegal and Mali share a currency despite belonging to different political groupings. So do Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso, and Benin and Niger.
Trade between the AES states and the five ECOWAS members that also belong to UEMOA therefore continues within a common-currency area, even as the organisations negotiate which other regional rights and obligations will survive.
That overlap limits the extent to which political separation can translate into economic separation without further institutional changes. Diplomatic structures can be reorganised by political decision; monetary and commercial relationships are embedded in a system involving governments well beyond the three AES countries.
There has been no agreement in the Dakar negotiations to change those monetary arrangements.
From political confrontation to practical negotiation
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger established the Alliance of Sahel States under the Liptako-Gourma Charter in September 2023. They subsequently signed a treaty establishing the AES Confederation at a summit in Niamey on July 6, 2024.
The three military-led governments presented the grouping as a sovereignty-centred alternative for security and regional co-operation after relations with ECOWAS deteriorated over military takeovers, sanctions and demands for a return to elected civilian government.
Withdrawal settled their formal membership, but not the conditions under which the two organisations would continue dealing with one another.
The May 2025 Bamako consultations established direct dialogue. Dakar has now moved the discussion towards joint technical work, without suggesting that the AES countries intend to rejoin ECOWAS.
The African Union Mission for Mali and the Sahel (MISAHEL) has advocated functional co-operation rather than allowing institutional differences to obstruct cross-border activity.
Mamadou Tangara, the African Union Special Representative for Mali and the Sahel and head of MISAHEL, identified security, transhumance, trade flows and climate pressures as challenges requiring a shared response.
The mission said cooperation should deliver practical benefits to border communities without prejudging the sovereign institutional choices of either side. It offered to facilitate future political and technical meetings and support the working groups.
Security cannot be negotiated in isolation
The most difficult area may be security. Armed violence centred on Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger has spread towards neighbouring parts of West Africa, while several commercially important roads cross regions affected by insurgency.
ECOWAS is separately working to operationalise its regional counter-terrorism brigade. In October 2026, the Commission said it was developing an implementation roadmap with the relevant authorities.
Earlier planning envisaged a force of 5,000 troops, but ECOWAS defence chiefs revised the initial deployment down to 1,650 in February 2026, with expansion planned over time. The force has not yet been deployed.
Its eventual effectiveness will depend partly on how ECOWAS co-ordinates with countries outside its membership. The AES states remain among those most heavily exposed to Sahel insurgencies, while neighbouring ECOWAS members face risks from militant movement and violence across the same borders.
The May 2025 Bamako consultations had already acknowledged that shared vulnerability and called for conditions permitting effective counter-terrorism co-operation. The Dakar talks provide another mechanism through which such arrangements could be negotiated, although no joint security framework has been concluded.
For now, the two organisations are attempting to give legal and institutional form to relationships that political decisions have not severed. The same currencies circulate, traders still depend on coastal markets, and security threats cross frontiers regardless of which regional body a country belongs to.
The working groups’ challenge will be to turn that continuing interdependence into workable agreements on trade, movement and security, without requiring either side to reverse the political choices that brought them to Dakar.