ECOWAS Trains Women Traders in The Gambia. The Programme They Are Navigating Was Not Built for Them

From 18 to 22 May 2026, the ECOWAS Commission, in collaboration with Women in Law and Development in Africa, held a five-day training workshop in Banjul for women traders and entrepreneurs in the agribusiness sector. The training covered legal frameworks governing cross-border trade in West Africa, documentation requirements for lawful business operations, the value of formalisation, and advocacy skills for engaging with decision-makers. It was organised within the framework of ECOWAS Vision 2050 and the Women in Trade Sub-Committee's three-year work plan under the Regional Trade Facilitation framework.

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The programme is well-intentioned and addresses real gaps. But to understand what it is actually solving, it is necessary to first understand the system it is trying to change.

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Women dominate informal cross-border trade in West Africa. Estimates vary by corridor and methodology, but across the region, women account for between 60 and 80 per cent of informal traders at land borders. They carry agricultural products, processed foods, textiles, and household goods across the borders that divide the region's 16 national markets. This trade is not marginal to regional commerce: informal cross-border trade accounts for a substantial portion of food distribution and local economic activity across Sahel and coastal West African states. In some corridors, it represents the primary mechanism by which rural producers access urban markets and how urban consumers access affordable food.

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These traders operate in an environment of legal and institutional contradiction. The ECOWAS protocols, in principle, guarantee the free movement of persons, goods, and services across member states. In practice, the borders of West Africa are sites of routine extortion, harassment, and informal taxation. Women traders are disproportionately targeted. Studies by organisations including USAID, the World Bank, and civil society networks have documented systematic patterns of harassment at border crossings: demands for sexual favours, confiscation of goods without receipts, arbitrary checkpoint fees that are illegal under regional agreements but enforced by the individuals physically controlling movement.

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A woman trader who knows that a particular border protocol prohibits unofficial fees is better equipped to refuse a demand and document an incident. That knowledge has value. But it does not change the structural conditions that make the demand possible: understaffed, underpaid border officials in states that lack the fiscal capacity to pay their civil servants adequately, operating checkpoints far from any meaningful accountability mechanism.

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The ECOWAS Women in Trade Sub-Committee's work plan includes the development of women-friendly border infrastructure, a simplified trade regime, and mechanisms for reporting harassment. These are structural interventions, not just training programmes. Their implementation depends on political will and budget allocation from member states that have been making regional integration pledges for decades with inconsistent follow-through.

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The Gambia workshop produced a structured advocacy plan and a mobilisation strategy for women traders within their communities. Those are genuine outputs. Whether they connect to the implementation of the sub-committee's structural agenda — or whether they exist parallel to it — is the question that determines whether the training produces lasting change or a well-documented event.

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ECOWAS Vision 2050 places women and youth at the core of the region's development agenda. It is a political document. The distance between its aspirations and the reality of what a woman trader experiences at the Gambian border is a measure of the institutional gap that workshops can narrow at the margins but cannot close on their own.