The East African Community planned on introducing the East African Shilling in 2012 but have missed multiple deadlines. Creating a common currency is difficult. If they're able to make it happen, certainly it would be good for trade. Many of the west African countries are small so they have extra incentive to ease the barriers to trade with their neighbors but that also means that anxiety over being swamped by other countries is a reasonable concern.
West Africa has a long history of border closures when one head of state doesn’t much like another. Trade doesn’t really tempt nations to open to their neighbours, because so much of the international trade on which the coastal countries of the region depend is through container shipping from China or other far-flung places, not from the people next door.
Not likely. They are asking for counties to keep reserves, and a budget balance that no country outside of Ghana, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast are prepared to do. Additionally, dismantling the CFA won’t be hard with France in the way. In the end they’ll kick this idea down the line again like they always do.
I'll be waiting to see if the CIA goes full Gaddafi on this new currency initiative as well. It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up in comparison to Gaddafi's prior proposition of transitioning away from the U.S. dollar in favor of the Gold Dinar?
Single currency without internal transfers will be hard to pull-off. Euro has a fudged internal transfer, and when that couldn't keep up in the aftermath of the Great Recession, it almost unraveled.
Gotta love an article which uses an acronym few people will have heard of before, without once telling us what it stands for. ECOWAS?
Hmmm... I'll guess "Economic Community of West African States"
Advertising your provincial ignorance isn't the best look.
Pandering to a global audience but not explaining your local terminology is the definition of 'provincial'.
I mean, it's an African site administered by an African company and an article written by a guy from Ghana.
It's like complaining foxnews doesn't explain the acronym "USA"