Africa’s most consequential financial integration tools are gathering dust not because they do not exist, but because the governments that created them have failed to direct the institutions beneath them to actually use them.
That is the pointed assessment emerging from business and policy circles as two major pan-African initiatives, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and the long-promised Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) single currency, continue to expose the distance between high-level political declarations and real-world implementation.
PAPSS was formally launched in January 2022 by the African Union (AU) and the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) as a real-time cross-border payment infrastructure, designed to let African businesses and individuals settle transactions in their local currencies without routing funds through foreign correspondent banks in Europe or the United States. Previously, African companies and their local banks used correspondent banks, often outside of Africa, to settle payments between two African currencies in a third, external currency, usually dollars or euros.
As of 2025, the PAPSS network has expanded its footprint across four regions, connecting 19 countries, with over 150 commercial banks and 14 payment switches. On paper, this represents meaningful progress. In practice, critics point to a persistent problem: central banks in countries such as Ghana and Nigeria have signed onto PAPSS, but many of their licensed commercial banks have not been directed to make the service available to ordinary customers, meaning the system remains effectively invisible at the point where most people and businesses would actually use it.
The gap is not theoretical. Traders attempting to send money between Nigeria and Ghana through PAPSS have found that local bank branches are unaware the option exists, let alone equipped to process it. The obstacle is not technical capacity. It is a failure of mandate, a failure of a head of state or central bank governor to convert a continental commitment into a domestic instruction.
This pattern runs deeper than PAPSS. The proposed ECOWAS single currency, known as the ECO, has been under discussion since the 1990s. The ECO has been pushed back several times since the launch of the ECOWAS single currency project, with the fifth launch deadline set for July 2027. In 2019, ECOWAS heads of state formally adopted the name ECO and pledged the currency would launch in 2020. Six years later, the deadline has been extended again, and fundamental questions about institutional arrangements and macroeconomic convergence remain unresolved.
The ECOWAS Director General of the West African Monetary Agency (WAMA) told a meeting in Monrovia in February 2026 that meeting the 2027 target would require extraordinary effort, warning that “a real heavy lifting” is required “or bite the bullet of realignment.”
A central reason the single currency remains elusive is the refusal of Francophone West African countries to abandon the CFA franc, a currency still tied to France and managed within a framework that gives Paris oversight of the monetary reserves of its former colonies. Of the 15 nations within ECOWAS, eight use the CFA franc, a currency still controlled by the French treasury and the European Central Bank to this day. France’s continued influence over these economies means that subscribing to any alternative monetary arrangement that would dilute that hold faces political resistance, regardless of what heads of state may agree to at continental summits.
The same logic applies to the SWIFT financial messaging network, the American-designed system through which the vast majority of international payments, including those between African countries, are processed. PAPSS represents a direct African alternative to that dependence. But as long as Western interests are served by African economies remaining within the SWIFT system, external pressure to transition will remain absent. The impetus must come from within, and specifically from governments choosing to enforce their own decisions.
The shipping and logistics dimension compounds the problem. ECOWAS leaders at their December 2025 summit ordered a 25 percent reduction in regional airfares from January 1, 2026, addressing one of the more tangible barriers to intra-regional mobility. Yet freight remains entirely unaddressed. A cargo shipment from Ghana to Nigeria today is commonly routed through Antwerp, Belgium, before returning to West Africa, because no functioning cabotage network connects the region’s ports directly. Without goods moving freely, financial integration tools cannot reach their potential.
The recurring lesson is this: Africa’s integration challenges are not primarily technical, legal or financial. They are political. The continent has built the instruments. What it lacks is the consistent will, after the meetings end and the communiqués are signed, to go home and implement them.
