The expanded BRICS grouping, now 11 members strong after its 2023 enlargement, is testing a fundamental question for West African governments: does institutional pluralism in global governance translate into concrete development gains, or does it simply multiply the diplomatic corridors through which the same structural inequalities travel?
The 18th BRICS summit, convened in New Delhi on 12-13 September 2025 under India’s chairmanship, arrives at a moment of genuine institutional ferment. The grouping’s expansion to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia has altered its geographic and economic centre of gravity. Africa now holds two seats at the table. That is not nothing. But representation without institutional leverage is symbolism, and West African policymakers have seen enough symbolic multilateralism to treat the distinction seriously.
BRICS began as an investment analyst’s acronym, a shorthand for high-growth emerging markets coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001. It became a formal intergovernmental forum in 2009. Its combined GDP now accounts for roughly 36 percent of global output at purchasing-power parity, surpassing the G7 bloc. Its New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, has disbursed over US$33 billion in financing since 2016, with a portfolio spanning transport, energy, water, and urban infrastructure. These are real numbers. They represent a genuine alternative financing architecture, however partial, to the World Bank and IMF lending windows that have historically conditioned African sovereign borrowing.
For ECOWAS member states, the relevance of this architecture is not abstract. Ghana, currently navigating a US$3 billion IMF Extended Credit Facility programme agreed in May 2023, understands acutely what conditionality costs in political capital and policy flexibility. Nigeria, managing a fiscal deficit that reached 5.4 percent of GDP in 2023 while simultaneously defending a newly unified exchange rate regime, faces comparable pressures. Senegal, whose offshore gas production is expected to come online in 2024-2025, is actively seeking infrastructure capital to convert resource wealth into industrial capacity rather than raw export revenue. Each of these economies has a concrete interest in financing diversification that reduces dependence on any single multilateral creditor or bilateral partner.
The New Development Bank’s Africa Regional Centre, established in Johannesburg in 2017, has processed loans to South Africa, Egypt, and a handful of other African sovereigns. West African states remain largely outside its active portfolio. That gap is a governance question as much as a financial one. WAEMU countries, bound by the West African franc and the fiscal convergence criteria of the UEMOA treaty, face specific constraints in accessing NDB instruments that require sovereign guarantees and creditworthiness assessments calibrated to larger economies. Closing that gap requires institutional adaptation on both sides, not just West African governments demonstrating creditworthiness, but the NDB developing appraisal frameworks suited to smaller, franc-zone economies with different monetary sovereignty profiles.
The AfCFTA dimension compounds this analysis. The African Continental Free Trade Area, operational since 2021 and now covering 54 AU member states, is building the regulatory architecture for a single continental market with a combined GDP of US$3.4 trillion. BRICS membership for African states, or structured observer and partner arrangements for those outside it, could theoretically accelerate AfCFTA implementation by channelling South-South trade finance, technology transfer, and logistics investment toward the continent’s integration project. The operative word is “theoretically.” The mechanism connecting BRICS cooperation frameworks to AfCFTA implementation corridors does not yet exist in any operational form. Building it would require deliberate institutional design, not summit communiqués.
West Africa’s regional integration architecture, anchored by ECOWAS and its 15 member states, has its own incomplete agenda that any engagement with BRICS must account for. The ECOWAS single currency project, long delayed and now targeting a revised 2027 timeline under the “eco” framework, remains stalled by Nigeria’s fiscal dominance, divergent inflation profiles, and the structural asymmetry between WAEMU’s eight franc-zone members and the six non-WAEMU states. A BRICS that genuinely supports monetary sovereignty and local-currency settlement, as its New Delhi agenda suggests, could provide political cover and technical precedent for ECOWAS monetary convergence. Countries like Brazil and India have developed bilateral local-currency swap arrangements that offer instructive, if imperfect, models.
The geopolitical framing that dominates Western commentary on BRICS, casting it as an anti-Western bloc led by China and Russia, misrepresents both the grouping’s internal dynamics and West Africa’s strategic interests. ECOWAS states maintain significant trade, security, and institutional relationships with the European Union, the United States, and France, relationships that carry real costs and real benefits. Ghana’s Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, Senegal’s EU fisheries agreements, Nigeria’s AGOA access to American markets: these are not peripheral. West African governments are not choosing between global camps. They are, at their most effective, managing a portfolio of relationships whose value depends on the specific sectoral and institutional context.
What BRICS offers West Africa, at its most useful, is not an alternative to Western partnerships but a negotiating counterweight that expands the policy space available to sovereign governments. When Ghana negotiated its IMF programme, the existence of alternative financing options, however imperfect, shaped the terms of the agreement. When Nigeria reformed its foreign exchange regime in 2023, the availability of Chinese currency swap lines through the People’s Bank of China provided a partial liquidity buffer. These mechanisms matter at the margin, and at the margin is often where macroeconomic stability is won or lost.
China’s role within this evolution warrants clear-eyed assessment. Its manufacturing capacity, infrastructure financing through the Belt and Road Initiative, and technological ecosystems, from Huawei’s telecom networks to Alibaba’s digital payment platforms, make it the dominant bilateral partner for most African states regardless of BRICS membership. West African governments have legitimate reasons to deepen economic ties with China. They also have legitimate reasons to ensure those ties are structured through transparent contracts, local-content requirements, and debt sustainability frameworks that protect fiscal sovereignty. The two positions are not contradictory. They require institutional capacity to negotiate effectively, which is itself a governance investment.
The New Delhi summit will produce a declaration. Declarations are not development policy. What West African governments, their finance ministries, central banks, and regional institutions, should extract from this moment is a concrete institutional agenda: specific NDB lending targets for West Africa, defined technical cooperation programmes in agriculture and digital infrastructure, and a structured dialogue between BRICS financial institutions and ECOWAS’s own development finance bodies. Anything less reduces a consequential geopolitical shift to a photo opportunity. The Global South’s confidence, to be durable, must be grounded in institutional outcomes that citizens and investors can measure.
