ANSWER
ECOWAS - Economic Community of West African States
ECOWAS was established by the Treaty of
Lagos signed in May 28, 1975. The member countries of ECOWAS are: Benin,
Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia,
Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and Cape Verde. Mauritania
used to be a member but decided to withdraw in 2000 to join the Arab Maghreb
Union.
The main objective of ECOWAS is to promote cooperation and integration in the
context of an economic union of West Africa in order to raise the living
standards of its people, to maintain and increase economic stability, to
strengthen relations among the Member States and contribute to the progress and
development of the African continent. If the initial objectives were
essentially economic, the Community however took on political and security
issues well. In 1990, it established a peacekeeping force (ECOMOG) to help deal
with various conflicts in the region.
Numerous problems have been encountered by ECOWAS in the enhancement of
the process of regional integration of West Africa. Among the most important of
these problems are: the political instability and bad governance that have
plagued many of the countries; the weakness of the national economies and their
insufficient diversification; the absence of reliable road, telecommunications
and energy infrastructure; the insufficient political will exhibited by some
member States; the bad economic policies in certain cases; the multiplicity of
organisations for regional integration with the same objectives; the
irregularity in the payment of financial contributions to the budgets of the
institutions; the failure to involve the civil society, the private sector and
mass movements in the process of integration; the defective nature of the
integrational machinery in certain cases.
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