Regional Integration in West Africa: The Fragility of Practical Pan-Africanism

Regional integration has occupied a distinctive place in Africa’s political imagination since independence. It was political before it became economic. The creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 gave Pan-Africanism an institutional expression, established the principle of the inviolability of the borders inherited from colonial rule, and made it possible -though not without difficulty- to organize common diplomatic action in support of the complete decolonization of the continent and the dismantling of racist regimes in Southern Africa.

Integration gradually acquired an economic dimension. The 1980 Lagos Plan of Action already linked productive transformation, collective self-reliance, the expansion of intra-African trade, and the progressive establishment of an African Economic Community. The 1991 Abuja Treaty subsequently provided a legal basis for this ambition. Finally, the African Union’s Agenda 2063 embedded integration in a much broader vision in which economic integration, prosperity, peace, democracy, the rule of law, and Africa’s international standing were expected to reinforce one another. NEPAD was subsequently institutionalized as well. Yet Africans are still waiting for an integration process that genuinely works for countries and citizens alike.

The problem, therefore, is neither a lack of ambition nor a shortage of organizations. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in West Africa. ECOWAS, WAEMU, BCEAO, BOAD, EBID, CILSS, WAPP, WAHO, GIABA, river-basin organizations, common legal institutions, and specialized agencies together form an exceptionally dense institutional network. In some respects, the region even possesses some of the most advanced forms of supranational governance on the continent. Eight countries share a currency and a central bank; seventeen African states have harmonized large parts of their business law under OHADA, whose Uniform Acts are directly applicable and prevail over conflicting national provisions.

Yet national economies remain only weakly integrated, regional value chains are still embryonic, borders frequently continue to function as economic and administrative obstacles, and the region has made little progress toward establishing itself as a significant production space within the global economy.

More seriously, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger formally withdrew from ECOWAS on January 29, 2025, while remaining members of several other regional organizations, including WAEMU. This development invites us to frame the question differently. Instead of continually asking what new organization should be created, what new treaty should be signed, or how far integration should be expanded, perhaps we should ask why the institutions already in place have produced so little effective integration.

Our hypothesis is that the answer lies first and foremost in the nature of the states themselves. Fragile states find it difficult to produce robust integration. Where administrative capacity is limited, territorial control incomplete, and governments themselves insufficiently constrained by the rule of law, national fragility tends to be transmitted to the collective institutions those states create. Regional integration then becomes more of a diplomatic construct than an organized process for producing regional public goods.

I. Many institutions, but integration for what?

West Africa clearly does not suffer from a shortage of organizations. Its problem lies instead in the articulation of numerous institutions with different geographical scopes, sometimes overlapping mandates, and highly unequal degrees of authority.

ECOWAS is the broadest geographical grouping. Created in 1975, its original mandate focused on economic integration, before expanding considerably to include the free movement of persons, peace and security, and later democratic governance. Since the departure of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, it comprises twelve member states.

WAEMU covers a narrower geographical space but is far more harmonized legally and economically. Its eight members share a currency, a central bank, a common monetary policy, a common external tariff, and community rules, some of which are directly applicable in national law. The Union also has a regional stock exchange, a development bank, and a multilateral framework for monitoring macroeconomic policies.

Alongside these two groupings are several sectoral organizations. CILSS works on agriculture, food security, climate, and natural resources. The West African Power Pool seeks to interconnect electricity grids and create a regional electricity market. The West African Health Organization addresses health challenges that, by their very nature, cross borders. GIABA organizes cooperation against money laundering and terrorist financing.

Other organizations manage clearly identifiable common resources. The Senegal River Development Organization, the Niger Basin Authority, the Gambia River Basin Development Organization, and the Volta Basin Authority are perhaps among the most intuitive forms of regional integration: a river does not stop at a political border, and the decisions taken by one country immediately generate externalities for its neighbors.

OHADA follows yet another logic. It does not seek to organize economic development. Instead, it addresses a precisely defined problem: establishing common business law across participating states and ensuring its coherent interpretation.

This plurality of organizations is not necessarily a weakness. The principle of subsidiarity suggests that it is rational to address each problem at the level where it can be dealt with most effectively. A river basin, monetary policy, and a cross-border epidemic do not require the same institutional boundaries or decision-making rules.

The difficulty begins when mandates overlap without any clear hierarchy, when the same states must simultaneously implement several regional strategies, when multiple organizations draw on the same national administrations or, above all, when the creation of an institution becomes a substitute for solving the problem for which it was created.

This is why a distinction must be drawn between institutional density and institutional effectiveness. An organization may have a treaty, headquarters, a secretariat, ministerial meetings, multi-year programs, and a budget without delivering the collective good that justified its creation.

Integration should therefore be assessed by its results. Do goods cross borders more easily? Are firms producing more at regional scale? Does electricity move from where it is available to where it is needed? Are citizens’ rights effectively protected when they cross a border? Do regional infrastructure systems function? Are common resources managed more efficiently? Are states better protected against risks that they cannot control individually?

Viewed from this perspective, the record becomes considerably more mixed.

II. An economic entegration that remains largely elusive

Economic integration nevertheless has an especially strong rationale in West Africa. National markets are generally small when measured not simply by population but by the product of population and per capita income; several countries are landlocked; and industrialization remains weak. A larger market should generate economies of scale, productive specialization, cross-border value chains, and better integration into the global economy.

WAEMU provides, in this respect, a useful “natural experiment” for economists, a kind of large-scale test. Rarely have apparently favorable conditions been so extensively assembled: geographical proximity, a largely shared administrative language, similar legal traditions, a long history of exchange, a common external tariff and, above all, a common currency and central bank. Yet the results remain surprisingly modest.

An IMF study published in 2025 shows that between 2000 and 2019 WAEMU’s trade openness ratio - exports plus imports as a share of GDP - increased only from 48 to 52 percent. In 2019, exports by WAEMU countries to the whole of Africa, including other WAEMU members, accounted for only about one quarter of their total exports. By comparison, around 60 percent of European Union trade takes place among its own members.

Integration into the global economy is hardly more convincing. WAEMU countries’ integration into global value chains is estimated to be roughly half that of the European Union and nearly twenty times lower than that of the former NAFTA area. Exports remain dominated by primary commodities and fuels. Processed products account for only around 43 percent of WAEMU exports to the rest of the world, compared with roughly 60 percent in ASEAN.

Cross-border trade is undoubtedly more substantial than official statistics suggest. Some estimates cited by the IMF put informal flows at 30 to 50 percent of intraregional trade. But this argument cuts both ways. Informal trade reveals the vitality of local economic networks and the long history of cross-border exchange; it also suggests that market integration may advance by bypassing the state rather than because of it.

Why, after decades of institutional integration, do both external and regional trade remain so difficult? The IMF identifies three main obstacles.

The first is tariff related. Through the ECOWAS common external tariff, WAEMU countries impose average duties of 9 to 10 percent on goods originating outside the Community.

The second is more revealing: non-tariff measures. These include differences in standards, sanitary and phytosanitary controls, and administrative or technical procedures. Their effect on trade among WAEMU countries is estimated to be equivalent to a tariff of around 17 percent. For Mali, the estimated tariff equivalent reaches 27 percent, compared with around 10 percent for Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. In other words, governments have legally removed tariff barriers among themselves while preserving - or allowing to develop - a multitude of administrative obstacles with economic effects comparable to those of the tariffs they abolished.

The third obstacle is what the IMF rather cautiously calls the “trade environment”: the quality of roads and corridors, border procedures, security, financing, telecommunications, human capital, institutions, and the functioning of public administrations. This is probably where the real problem lies.

A tariff is a trade-policy variable. A usable road, a professional customs service, a court capable of enforcing a contract, a credible veterinary service, a border crossing free from informal payments, police capable of securing a corridor, or a public administration able to digitize and share data are all state capabilities.

A World Bank study published in 2026 reaches a particularly revealing conclusion: roughly 60 percent of African trade costs stem from constraints located within countries themselves - including logistics, inspections, regulation, customs, and services - rather than from tariff barriers between countries.

The problem of regional integration then appears in a different light. It is not enough for governments to decide that borders should be open. Their states must also be capable of administering those borders effectively for that purpose.

III. State fragility as an explanation for weak integration

State fragility should not be reduced to poverty, insecurity, or weak administration. It can and should be understood through three related but distinct dimensions: legitimacy, authority, and capacity. Legitimacy refers to the acceptance of political power and of the rules it establishes. Authority refers to the state’s ability to enforce its decisions throughout its territory. Capacity refers to the administrative, financial, and technical means required to design and implement public policy. These three dimensions help explain why national fragility directly affects regional integration.

1. States insufficiently constrained by law

A central element must be added: the rule of law. The rule of law does not mean merely the existence of laws, constitutions, or courts. It requires those who govern to be themselves subject to rules whose application they cannot arbitrarily alter.

This issue is central to the political economy of development. Where political power is weakly constrained, the allocation of public resources depends more heavily on the immediate interests of those who govern. Public goods then suffer from a specific political disadvantage: their benefits are diffuse, often delayed, extend even to citizens who do not support the government and, in the case of regional public goods, may also accrue to citizens of other countries.

A political leader may obtain a much more immediate political return from distributing jobs, contracts, subsidies, or targeted advantages to identifiable constituencies than from financing a regional phytosanitary control system, a road corridor whose benefits will be spread over twenty years, or a genuinely independent court.

This is where political economy meets the institutional question. Integration does not simply require states to surrender part of their sovereignty. It requires them to transform part of their national resources into collective goods whose benefits they will not control alone.

Such a transformation is much more difficult where national political institutions themselves do not strongly constrain governments to provide public goods. Here, at the regional level, we encounter the broader problem of development: formal institutions may exist without sufficiently changing the underlying incentives of political elites.

2. Fragile national legitimacy becomes regional fragility

The recent ECOWAS crisis illustrates this mechanism. The coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and Niger in 2023 brought the new military regimes into conflict with regional norms governing democracy and unconstitutional changes of government.

ECOWAS became trapped in a contradiction. If it failed to enforce its own rules, those rules would lose credibility. If it enforced them too harshly, it risked turning an internal legitimacy crisis within the affected countries into a confrontation between national governments and the regional organization. To some extent, that is what happened.

The three countries formally left ECOWAS in January 2025, but separation immediately proved more complicated than political declarations suggested. ECOWAS requested that, until further notice, passports and identity cards bearing its logo continue to be recognized, visa-free movement be maintained, and goods originating in the three countries continue to benefit from the Community trade regime.

Nothing better illustrates the gap between proclaimed sovereignty and real interdependence. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger may leave a political organization; they cannot abolish by decree their geography, trade corridors, border communities, monetary ties with WAEMU, electricity networks, or shared river basins.

But ECOWAS must also bear its share of responsibility. Its democratic credibility has been weakened by the different treatment accorded to military coups and to certain forms of constitutional manipulation by civilian governments. An organization claiming to defend constitutional order cannot sustainably reduce that principle to the proposition that soldiers must not overthrow elected governments. The quality of elections, judicial independence, effective checks and balances, and respect for succession rules must also enter the equation.

The regional issue thus intersects with that of substantive democracy. A community based on the rule of law cannot be durably constructed by states in which the rule of law itself remains vulnerable.

3. Territorial authority: Can States integrate areas they do not fully control?

The second dimension is authority. A regional decision has no force of its own at the Mali–Burkina Faso border or on a road in the Tillabéri region. It must be implemented by public officials, police officers, customs agents, judges, and national administrations.

In parts of the Sahel, this condition is no longer assured. Armed groups control or contest territory, public administrations have withdrawn from certain areas, and major transport corridors are exposed to insecurity. An officially open border may therefore become economically more closed than a border formally protected by tariffs.

The same difficulty arises with common resources. An international agreement on the use of a river remains largely theoretical if a state is unable to measure withdrawals, control activities upstream, enforce environmental standards, or protect infrastructure.

Fragility then generates a negative regional externality. The weakness of a single state reduces the effectiveness of cooperation for all the others. This logic is especially obvious in the security sphere. Jihadist groups recognize neither ECOWAS nor the AES. A national strategy in which neighboring countries do not share intelligence, border surveillance, or operational doctrine will necessarily achieve limited results.

The World Bank now explicitly recognizes this cross-border dimension of fragility and organizes part of its regional programming around fragile zones in the Sahel, Lake Chad Basin, and Horn of Africa.

4. Administrative capacity: The forgotten weak link of integration

The third dimension is less spectacular but probably more decisive in everyday practice. A regional regulation is implemented by a national administration. A free-movement policy depends on immigration officers. A customs union depends on customs administrations. A common health policy depends on laboratories and national surveillance systems. A regional road corridor depends on maintenance undertaken in every country it crosses.

A regional chain therefore performs only as well as its weakest link. This observation helps explain an important contradiction within WAEMU. Member states have accepted sophisticated macroeconomic convergence criteria - debt, deficit, inflation - yet the institutional convergence of the administrations required to make the common market function remains far less advanced.

Why not also establish convergence indicators covering border-crossing times, customs digitization, harmonization of sanitary controls, enforcement of court decisions, electricity availability, or corridor security?

We measure what we consider important. By focusing almost exclusively on macroeconomic convergence, regional integration has for a long time given greater weight to nominal stability and the standards of international financial institutions than to the convergence of public capabilities required for a regional market to function.

IV. Returning to the purpose of integration: Producing regional public goods

This reading of the West African situation suggests the need for a change in perspective. Regional integration should not be measured primarily by the number of treaties, organizations, or summits, but by its capacity to produce goods that states cannot efficiently provide on their own.

The concept of regional public goods helps clarify this point. Some problems are intrinsically regional: border security, epidemic control, river management, transport corridors, electricity interconnections, certain payment systems, anti-money-laundering mechanisms, and climate monitoring. No individual state can capture all the benefits of investing in these areas, and no border can completely contain the effects of failure.

In such areas, real sovereignty does not necessarily mean acting alone. It may instead mean possessing collectively capabilities that no state could efficiently produce by itself. This is why some specialized organizations sometimes perform better than broad integration institutions.

OHADA is one example. It seeks to answer a clearly defined question: what business law should apply when a company operates in several countries? Its institutional answer is equally precise: common Uniform Acts that are directly applicable and a common court responsible for interpreting them. The organization does not attempt to harmonize all economic policy. It produces an identifiable collective good: greater legal predictability.

The same is true of river-basin organizations, which manage an obvious externality. Water is a common resource whose uses are interdependent.

Elinor Ostrom’s work helps avoid a false choice between absolute national sovereignty and regional centralization. Effective management of a common resource can be based on a polycentric architecture: negotiated rules, user participation, shared monitoring, graduated sanctions, dispute-resolution mechanisms, and nested levels of decision-making. The Senegal River Development Organization provides an especially interesting case through the joint ownership of certain infrastructure and the sharing of the benefits generated by its operation.

The broader lesson, however, is methodological: cooperation works better when the resource is identifiable, the relevant actors are relatively clearly defined, and both costs and benefits can be observed. Electricity provides another example of integration built around a concrete gain. The West African Power Pool seeks to interconnect national systems, enabling a country with a temporary surplus to sell electricity to a neighbor facing a shortage, while theoretically reducing the need for every country to construct redundant generation capacity.

According to the World Bank, the interconnection of the networks of the fourteen countries concerned had been completed and around 10 percent of electricity was already being traded through the regional system by the time of its 2023 assessment. This remains insufficient to create a genuinely integrated electricity market. But it reveals something essential: integration becomes far more tangible when users can identify what it produces. That is precisely what is often missing from broader political ambitions.

V. The AfCFTA paradox

It is from this perspective that the enthusiasm surrounding the African Continental Free Trade Area should be examined. Its economic potential is undeniable. A larger continental market can offer African firms economies of scale, facilitate regional value chains, and reduce some of the continent’s dependence on primary commodity exports.

Yet there is a paradox. The IMF study on WAEMU estimates that ambitious implementation of the AfCFTA, combining substantial tariff reductions with lower non-tariff barriers, could raise real per capita income in Union countries by about 2 percent over the long term. If liberalization were accompanied by substantial improvements in infrastructure, finance, and security, the gain could approach 10 percent.

But this conclusion can also be read in reverse. It means that the treaty itself generates only a fraction of the potential gains. Most of the benefits depend precisely on the variables that existing regional agreements have found most difficult to change: infrastructure, public administration, security, regulation, and the capacity to enforce commitments.

An uncomfortable question therefore arises. If eight neighboring countries with a common currency, broadly comparable administrative traditions, a common central bank, developed community law, and several decades of integration have failed to eliminate trade barriers equivalent to a 17 percent tariff among themselves, how can one assume that extending the framework to fifty-four economies will by itself solve the problem?

It would nevertheless be excessive to conclude that the AfCFTA is entirely useless. The intellectual sequence should instead be reversed. The AfCFTA should be regarded as a framework that may facilitate integration over the long term, not as its cause or its accelerator. A continental agreement can legally remove barriers. It cannot create, in place of national states, professional customs administrations, safe roads, independent courts, quality-control laboratories, or public administrations capable of circulating information.

The World Bank now comes close to stating this explicitly. In its 2026 report on African integration, it places at the center of the agenda not merely trade agreements but the interoperability of customs systems, standards, payments, transport and energy systems, as well as the provision of regional public goods. It also stresses that “specific, binding and enforceable” commitments generate stronger outcomes. In other words, the economics of integration ultimately leads back to the political economy of institutions.

VI. The AES does not Solve the problem either

The creation of the Alliance of Sahel States and the joint withdrawal of its three members from ECOWAS were presented by their governments as a historic break and an assertion of sovereignty. Criticism of ECOWAS is not entirely unfounded. Its political action has sometimes seen as inconsistent; Sahelian governments have considered its support against jihadist violence insufficient; and its institutional architecture suffers from the predominance of heads of state.

But the AES does not, for the time being, address the structural problem identified here. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger are precisely three of the states in the region where the combination of weak territorial authority, limited fiscal capacity, and insecurity is most severe. Pooling their strengths may prove useful. Pooling their weaknesses is not sufficient to create new capabilities and could prove more than counterproductive.

The risk is that the three countries will reproduce on a smaller scale what functioned imperfectly at fifteen: creating a new institutional architecture before defining precisely which public goods it can produce.

Sovereigntist encounters its practical limits here. None of the three countries, whether acting alone or together, can change the fact that they are landlocked and dependent on transport corridors leading to ports on the Gulf of Guinea. None can disregard WAEMU monetary policy if it continues to use the CFA franc. None can eliminate its energy, trade, pastoral, or human interdependence with neighboring countries. Absolute sovereignty is therefore a fiction in a region characterized by such strong interdependence.

VII. What is to be done? From institutional Pan-Africanism to a regionalism of results

Several useful lessons emerge from an analysis that takes state fragility and the political economy - and therefore the actual outcomes - of regional integration seriously.

1. Rationalize before creating new institutions

West Africa does not, as a priority, need another organization. What is needed instead is a genuine review of the regional architecture: objectives, mandates, costs, funding arrangements, overlaps, and results. Some functions could be consolidated. Others should remain sector specific. Some historic organizations may have completed their cycle. Others possess expertise that it would be absurd to dilute in a broader structure. The criterion should not be institutional age or diplomatic prestige, but value added.

2. Start with public goods rather than Organizations

The question should be asked in reverse. Not: “What should the future institutional architecture of West Africa look like?” But rather: “Which major problems can no West African state solve effectively on its own?”

A useful, though not exhaustive, list of regional public goods is relatively easy to identify:

• cross-border security and intelligence;

• major road and rail corridors;

• energy and electricity interconnections;

• management of river basins and shared natural resources;

• epidemiological surveillance;

• regional payment systems;

• essential trade standards;

• mobility and the rights of persons;

• the fight against organized crime;

• and certain high-level university and scientific infrastructures.

Institutions should first be built around these problems, institutions that are limited in scope, accountable, and capable of being evaluated.

3. Accept variable-geometry integration

All countries need not necessarily move at the same speed in every policy area. A coalition of countries wishing to accelerate the integration of their electricity grids or customs procedures should be able to do so without waiting for the entire region.

Such differentiated integration already exists in practice. WAEMU, OHADA, river-basin organizations, and WAPP do not have identical memberships. Rather than treating this as an anomaly, it should be recognized as a method, provided that the different arrangements remain compatible and open.

4. Revise decision-making rules

The sovereign equality of states is a legal principle. Taken too literally, however, it can become a counterproductive fiction. It does not necessarily follow that every decision must be taken unanimously. The stronger the regional externalities, the weaker the economic justification for an individual veto.

A fundamental treaty amendment or an irreversible transfer of sovereignty may legitimately require unanimity. But operational decisions concerning infrastructure, technical standards, or certain public goods could be taken by qualified majority. The problem, however, is not only to make better decisions. The greater challenge is to implement them better.

5. Introduce genuine institutional convergence

Regional integration criteria should no longer measure only deficits, debt, or inflation. It should systematically monitor the capabilities on which a common market depends through indicators such as:

• average border-crossing times;

• digitization and interconnection of customs systems;

• frequency of informal payments;

• enforcement of regional court decisions;

• recognition of identity documents;

• harmonization of sanitary and phytosanitary standards;

• security of transport corridors;

• quality of statistical systems;

• interoperability of payment systems.

Macroeconomic convergence without a minimum convergence of state capabilities necessarily produces incomplete integration.

6. Make the rule of law a condition of integration

This is probably the most difficult proposal. A “people’s ECOWAS” cannot rest solely on theoretical freedom of movement. It requires that a citizen crossing a border remain the bearer of rights enforceable against the administration of the host country.

It requires accessible courts, predictable decisions, public officials subject to the law, and governments that cannot simply choose which community rules they wish to apply.

In this respect, West African political integration could benefit from considering a form of institutional convergence comparable in principle - but not through mechanical imitation - to the political criteria used in other integration experiences.

The objective would not be to import an institutional model, but to recognize a simple reality: a common market based on shared rules is difficult to sustain among states whose commitment to the rule of law differs profoundly.

Conclusion: Pooling capacity rather than fragility

West Africa now has nearly sixty years of experience with regional integration. This history has produced significant achievements: relatively advanced freedom of movement, a common currency for eight countries, harmonized business law, partially interconnected energy infrastructure, experienced river-basin organizations, health-cooperation mechanisms, and regional financial institutions that remain imperfect but firmly established.

It would therefore be excessive to speak of absolute failure. But it would be equally difficult to speak of success. The region has integrated its institutions far more effectively than its economies. It has created more common rules than common capabilities. It has proclaimed the benefits of integration more successfully than it has organized their production.

This divergence cannot be explained solely by a poorly designed regional architecture. It also reflects the nature of the states that make up that architecture. Where territorial authority is incomplete, even national rules are difficult to enforce. Where administrations are weak, regional commitments are only partially implemented. Where the rule of law insufficiently constrains governments, incentives to invest in diffuse and long-term public goods remain weak. And where political legitimacy is fragile, national sovereignty can easily be mobilized against regional institutions whenever regional commitments become politically costly. National fragility thus becomes regional fragility.

This does not mean that West Africa should wait until its states have been perfectly consolidated before pursuing integration. Some regional institutions can themselves strengthen states by pooling capacities that individual countries could not efficiently produce on their own.

But the logic must be reversed. The goal should no longer be to create institutions and hope that integration will follow. The objective should be to identify the regional public goods needed by citizens and economies, build institutions capable of delivering them, measure their results, and allow successful interdependence gradually to consolidate political integration.

The European experience is neither a model nor a recipe in this respect. But it does show clearly that sustainable integration can begin with limited and concrete common interests before becoming a more ambitious political project.

For West Africa, this may be the true meaning of practical Pan-Africanism. Regional integration will become credible only when it ceases to be primarily a project of political institutions and becomes a process for producing regional public goods. And, like democracy itself, its legitimacy will depend less on what it proclaims than on what it delivers.

Indicative References

Abbas, Ali et al. 2023. Trade Integration in Africa: Unleashing the Continent’s Potential in a Changing World. IMF Departmental Paper 2023/003.

Hakobyan, Shushanik, Fiona Hesse-Triballi, Sergii Meleshchuk, and Hans Weisfeld. 2025. Unleashing the Benefits of Intra-African Trade Integration for the WAEMU. IMF Selected Issues Paper 2025/071.

North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Putzel, James. 2010. “Why Development Actors Need a Better Definition of State Fragility.” Crisis States Research Centre Policy Directions.

World Bank. 2020. The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects. Washington, DC.

World Bank. 2026. Integrating Africa: From Threads to Hubs. Washington, DC.