Date of Award
6-26-2026
Date Published
August 2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
African American Studies
Advisor(s)
Horace Campbell
Keywords
AfCFTA;African Integration;African Political Economy;Class and Gender;ECOWAS;Feminist - Matricentric Framework
Subject Categories
African Studies | International and Area Studies | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
Abstract: This thesis examines the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a test for understanding Africa’s continental economic integration under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). It argues that the persistent failures of state-led integration, in this matter, the ECOWAS, from the repeated inability to roll out a single currency for trade within West Africa to the deliberate infiltration of France and other Western capitalist interests in the economic lives of the people of West Africa, are not just incidental failures of political will or technical implementation setbacks. They are consequences of building Pan-Africanism and integration efforts on the wrong institutional foundations. Frameworks that misrecognize where Africa’s economic life resides, who produces it, and whose authority genuinely integrates the continent. Using the case study of Ghana and Burkina Faso and drawing on a comparative mixed-methods design, combining semi-structured interviews with officials at the AfCFTA Secretariat and the Burkina Shippers Council, field observations along the Ghana–Burkina Faso trade corridor, Makola Market, Tema Port, and analysis of primary documents, statistical data, and secondary literature, the study employs the intersectionality of a critical feminist and African – centered political economy framework of integration as its theoretical framework. This framework treats continental integration not as a neutral trade-liberalization project but as a gendered restructuring of economic and social relations, one that must be interrogated simultaneously through the lenses of class, gender, and colonial history. The thesis concludes by reinforcing the concept of production sovereignty: a fundamental reorientation of the AfCFTA away from trade liberalization, which primarily serves exporters of capital, toward integration built on the matricentric networks that already constitute Africa’s real and dominant economic infrastructure. Specific recommendations include the institutionalization of market-to-market protocols recognizing women’s councils and cross-border trader cooperatives as legitimate governance actors; aggressive continental tax harmonization to stem illicit financial outflows; productive industrialization policies that directly address youth waithood; and the reconstitution of the Union Government project as Matricentric Pan-Africanism, a model in which the inter-market authority that Africa’s women have already built provides the institutional foundation for continental integration rather than its afterthought.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Agbo, Michael, "From Regionalism to Continentalism: Lessons from ECOWAS for the Implementation of AfCFTA." (2026). Theses - ALL. 1055.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/1055
