Officials meeting in Banjul say non-tariff barriers and a thriving but unrecognised informal sector are the real obstacles to regional trade — and that formalising, not fighting, informal commerce may be the way forward.
Four decades after its founding, ECOWAS is still struggling to turn West Africa’s economic bloc into a genuine trading union: official intra-regional trade remains stuck between 10 and 15 percent of the region’s total trade volume, a figure that has barely moved in years.
That was the sobering backdrop to a strategic round-table held on June 16, 2026, in Banjul, The Gambia, where ECOWAS experts and technical missions gathered to confront the structural barriers holding back deeper economic integration. The diagnosis offered by participants was consistent: non-tariff barriers — the checkpoints, informal levies, documentation demands, and inconsistent enforcement that traders face crossing borders — remain the single biggest drag on formal trade, compounded by an informal sector so large it may represent the true engine of regional commerce, invisible to official statistics.
“The simplified trade regime currently in place at regional level is a requirement, a necessity for businesses and cross-border traders, and also a necessity for the formalisation of the informal sector,” said Mamadou Koné, a delegate from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Côte d’Ivoire. “Africa is lagging behind — today, in our region, we are still lagging behind. In terms of integration, we have some way to go; our trade volumes stand at around 12 percent or 15 percent. We can do better if we manage to eliminate the non-tariff barriers that our traders and other stakeholders encounter within ECOWAS.”
The gap between the official numbers and reality on the ground may be the round-table’s most striking finding. Razack Yessoufou, Director of Trade Facilitation at the Benin Chamber of Commerce and Industry, argued that the 15 percent figure dramatically understates how much trade is actually happening between neighbouring countries — it simply isn’t being counted. “When you add in informal trade, the figure quickly rises to 70 or 75 percent of trade between neighbouring countries,” Yessoufou said, describing a shadow economy of small traders moving goods across borders every day without being reflected in any official ledger.
For ECOWAS, the implication is that the priority is not to suppress or compete with this informal trade, but to formalise it — building the capacity of small traders, developing proper trade corridors, and expanding the region’s simplified trade regime so that moving goods legally becomes easier than moving them informally. Participants in Banjul framed this as the central lever for transformation: if even a fraction of that estimated 70-75 percent of informal cross-border activity could be brought into the formal system, West Africa’s real trade integration numbers would look entirely different from the stagnant 10-15 percent the bloc has reported for years.
The round-table’s conclusions add to a growing body of evidence that ECOWAS’s next phase of integration will be won or lost not on grand treaty commitments, but on the unglamorous work of clearing bureaucratic friction at the region’s land borders — the daily reality for the small traders who, by every account, already move far more goods across West Africa than official statistics give them credit for.
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