ECOWAS Response to Terrorism Financing in West Africa: Towards a Coordinated Regional Approach to Counter-Terrorism Financing Initiatives

The study examined the counter-terrorism financing initiatives of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as contained in the ECOWAS Counter-Terrorism Strategy and Implementation Plan (ECTS) and the Inter-Governmental Action Group against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA). The study adopts a qualitative research approach, which includes a systematic review of ECOWAS’s statutory and regulatory documents as well as member states’s official policy documents. The study argues that while these efforts have contributed to the progress of Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) framework, existential realities in the West African sub-region proved otherwise. The implementation of different AML/CFT regulations by individual states has failed to provide the desired results. The evolving nature of global and regional security threats necessitated the application of post-neo-functionalist theory in this study. Among other things, the study recommends that ECOWAS’s counter-terrorism financing efforts should depart from member states’s AML/CFT laws to the enactment of common and unified regional AML/CFT laws.