West Africa's Economic Growth Is Accelerating While Its Food Crisis Deepens

ECOWAS released its 2025 to 2027 Regional Economic Outlook on June 9, 2026, a document that offers the clearest current picture of where West Africa's economy is headed and where it continues to fall short. Regional GDP growth was estimated at 4.3 percent in 2024, up from 3.6 percent in 2023. The trajectory is projected to accelerate through the forecast period, reaching 4.8 percent in 2025, 5.0 percent in 2026, and 7.1 percent in 2027. The drivers are familiar: expansion in the energy sector, extractive industries, infrastructure investment, and the growth of financial and digital services.

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These are genuine gains. They reflect investment flows, production volumes, and economic activity that in parts of the region are real and measurable. But the same report registers a number that sits in uncomfortable proximity to those projections: in 2024, more than 34.7 million people across West Africa required urgent food assistance. That figure represents a failure not of economic output but of distribution, governance, and agricultural investment, and the report is candid about the structural reasons it persists.

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The food security dimension of the outlook identifies four overlapping vulnerabilities: the availability, access, utilisation, and stability of food systems across the region. West Africa remains a net food importer for key staples, leaving household food security exposed to global price volatility and supply chain disruptions. Climate shocks, which are increasing in frequency and severity across the Sahel and coastal regions, undercut production cycles and force farmers into distress sales. Post-harvest losses, estimated at significant proportions of total output in many member states, reduce effective food availability without appearing in production statistics. And recurring trade restrictions between member states, imposed during price spikes or export crises, undermine the regional market integration that would otherwise buffer local shortfalls.

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The beneficiaries of the current growth trajectory are concentrated in the sectors the report identifies as drivers: extractive industries, which are capital-intensive and generate limited direct employment relative to output; financial services, which are primarily urban; and infrastructure investment, which depends on procurement capacity and financing terms that often favour external contractors. Agricultural smallholders, who constitute the majority of the rural labour force in most ECOWAS states, are not the primary beneficiaries of the forecast growth. They are, however, the primary bearers of food insecurity risk.

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What the report does not say directly is that the misalignment between headline growth and food security outcomes reflects choices embedded in budget allocations, trade policy, and development finance priorities that have remained broadly consistent for decades. The ECOWAS Agricultural Policy, ECOWAP, has been in place since 2005. The Maputo Declaration, committing African governments to allocating at least 10 percent of national budgets to agriculture, is more than 20 years old. Member state compliance has been inconsistent. The result is that food security frameworks exist, early warning systems exist, reserve mechanisms exist, and yet 34 million people still needed emergency assistance in 2024.

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The report recommends strengthening domestic resource mobilisation, accelerating agricultural investment, improving irrigation coverage, and reducing barriers to intra-regional trade. These are the right recommendations. They are also the same recommendations that have appeared in successive editions of this and similar regional reports. The question of why implementation has consistently lagged behind prescription is a political one, involving the distribution of fiscal resources within member states, the influence of urban consumer interests over rural producer interests, and the incentive structures of political leadership in contexts where election cycles are shorter than agricultural transformation timelines. The 2025 to 2027 outlook, like its predecessors, stops short of engaging with that question directly.

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The African Continental Free Trade Area represents a genuine structural opportunity. If regional agri-food value chains can develop depth, if transportation and cold storage infrastructure can reduce post-harvest losses, and if harmonised standards can create larger and more stable markets for regional producers, the growth forecast and the food security deficit could begin to converge rather than diverge. Whether the political conditions required for that convergence can be created in the current environment, particularly given the security pressures facing several ECOWAS member states, is the most consequential open question the report raises without fully answering.