The five heads of state of the G5 Sahel countries - Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger - gathered at their 5th summit on 5 February in Ouagadougou, following a series of expert and ministerial meetings. The rotating presidency was officially transferred from Niger to Burkina Faso for a one-year mandate. Despite efforts to quickly scale-up the joint military force’s operations, the situation in the Sahel remains highly unstable.What did this summit achieve? Read on

The official celebration ceremony took place on 10 January in the capital city of Burkina Faso at the International Conference Centre of Ouaga 2000. The group welcomed the presence of President Alassane Dramane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire, the current chair of the UEMOA’s Heads of State and Governments Conference. In terms of challenges, he highlighted the low rate of intra-community trade; the large number of border controls, delays and illegal imposed levies; the distortion of competition; and difficulties of some companies in gaining access to markets within the union. At the end of the ceremony, the two presidents inaugurated the new UEMOA administrative complex, located in Ouaga 2000. Read on

The autonomous Port of Lomé has overtaken Lagos and is now West Africa’s leading port with a capacity of 1.1 million twenty-foot containers (TEU). Thanks to modernisation reforms, the Port of Lomé tripled its capacity from 311 500 containers in 2013 to 1.1 million in 2017. Nigeria’s Apapa Port in Lagos (1 million TEU) lost 30% of its container traffic over five years due to chronic congestion and the poor quality of its services. Other West African ports have stagnated. Tema in Ghana (0.95 million TEU) maintains rank 3, followed by Abidjan (0.66 million TEU) and Dakar (0.57 million TEU). Read on

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta won the run-off election on 16 August and will now start a second term. Against a backdrop of violence, crisis and instability, can President Keïta bring about the changes needed for a lasting peace? This opinion piece from the SWAC/OECD Secretariat suggests that the government should refocus its attention on northern Mali to make it once again a central and shared space that is more than just the “north of Mali. Read on