West Africa has taken its most concrete step yet toward a unified cross-border capital market after the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission convened the final technical consultations on a binding charter that would transform the West African Securities Regulators Association (WASRA/ARMVMAO) into the region’s official capital market regulatory authority, with the document now positioned for submission to the bloc’s highest decision-making bodies for formal adoption.
The three-day Technical Committee meeting, held in Lomé, Togo, from February 17 to 19, 2026, brought together capital market regulators from all 12 current ECOWAS member states to consolidate final comments on the WASRA Charter before its submission to the ECOWAS Convergence Council and subsequently the Council of Ministers. Representing the Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Agriculture, Dr. Kalilou Sylla, Acting Director of Private Sector Mr. Peter Oluonye told delegates the Lomé session marks the conclusion of a member state consultation process that began in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in January 2025, and was advanced at an experts validation meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, in October 2025.
The process carries direct implications for the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) and Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), both of which are founding participants in the West African Capital Markets Integration Council (WACMIC), the institutional framework within which the GSE, the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX), the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières (BRVM) serving the eight-member West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) zone, and exchanges in Sierra Leone, Cabo Verde and The Gambia are aligned. Under the finalised WASRA model, cross-border securities activities across all ECOWAS jurisdictions would be regulated under a unified authority with harmonised licensing, mutual recognition and common investor protection standards, replacing the current patchwork of nationally distinct frameworks that make issuing and trading securities across borders administratively complex and expensive.
The scale of the financing gap underpinning the urgency for integration was made explicit at the October 2025 Abuja meeting by WASRA Chairman and Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission Director-General Dr. Emomotimi Agama, who noted that Africa faces an annual infrastructure financing gap exceeding $100 billion, while West Africa alone requires tens of billions of dollars to modernise transport corridors, upgrade energy systems and expand digital infrastructure. “An integrated regional capital market is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. Without integrated markets that pool liquidity and broaden investor participation, our governments and private sector will remain constrained, relying on limited fiscal space and expensive borrowing,” he said.
The Lomé meeting also had to reckon with a structural shift in ECOWAS itself. On January 29, 2025, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger formally withdrew from ECOWAS, reducing the bloc from 15 to 12 members. The three departing states were home to a combined population of roughly 72 million people and were part of the WAEMU monetary zone, which is the largest component of the planned integrated market by the number of exchanges. Their departure has narrowed the geographic scope of integration but has also removed three states whose governments had signalled limited appetite for the multilateral rules-based approach that WASRA requires. Analysts have noted that a smaller but more committed ECOWAS may produce a more legally coherent and implementable charter than a broader grouping with divergent political orientations.
The integration is structured across three phases: Phase 1 enables sponsored access trading between member state brokers through local partners in other jurisdictions; Phase 2 introduces a common passport allowing qualified West African brokers to trade directly across member state markets; Phase 3 establishes a fully linked virtual West African Single Market (WASM) where settlement banks can also raise capital across the region. WASRA’s formal establishment as the regulatory authority is the prerequisite for Phases 2 and 3 to proceed with legal certainty.
The WASRA Charter will now move to the ECOWAS Convergence Council before being submitted to the Council of Ministers for final adoption, the last formal hurdle before WASRA becomes operational as the continent’s first sub-regional cross-border capital market regulator.
