What is the AES, and why does its internal review matter?
Burkina Faso’s National Commission of the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) convened on Thursday to assess progress against the Confederation’s second-year roadmap, exposing both incremental gains and structural gaps in the bloc’s institutional machinery. The meeting, chaired by Bassolma Bazie, president of the National Commission, marks a significant governance test for a political project that has positioned itself as an alternative to the West African regional order anchored by ECOWAS.
The AES is not a minor diplomatic experiment. Formed first as a mutual defense alliance in 2023 by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, the three military-led governments elevated the arrangement into a full confederation in July 2024. Their formal withdrawal from ECOWAS in January 2025 severed ties with the 15-member bloc that has governed West African trade, security, and monetary cooperation for five decades. What happens inside the AES’s nascent institutions now carries weight far beyond the Sahel.
Thursday’s review offers a rare window into how the Confederation is actually functioning, not as a diplomatic declaration, but as an operational governance structure attempting to deliver on commitments made at the heads-of-state level.
What did the review actually find?
Mohamed Savadogo, secretary-general of the National Commission, presented an implementation report covering activity up to 30 June 2025. According to Savadogo, measurable progress has been recorded across the Confederation’s three formal pillars: defense and security, development, and diplomacy. The framing of these pillars reflects a deliberate institutional architecture, one that mirrors, at least structurally, the multi-dimensional integration frameworks used by ECOWAS and the African Union.
Yet the review was candid about shortfalls. Participants identified a persistent lag between planned activities and actual execution, attributing it to inadequate early-stage financial planning, slow implementation procedures, and insufficient resource mobilization. These are not peripheral technical complaints. They point to the foundational challenge confronting any new regional institution: building administrative capacity and fiscal credibility simultaneously, without the decades of institutional memory that ECOWAS accumulated since 1975.
The commission’s recommendations called for accelerated financial resource mobilization, stronger coordination and monitoring among stakeholders across the three member states, and improved oversight mechanisms. In Bazie’s framing, the AES is “a long-term project that requires perseverance, commitment and collective responsibility,” language that signals awareness of the gap between political ambition and institutional delivery.
How does the AES’s institutional architecture compare to regional standards?
Measuring the AES against ECOWAS or the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) reveals the scale of the institutional distance to be covered. WAEMU, which includes Burkina Faso and Mali as members, operates a common currency (the CFA franc), a regional central bank (BCEAO), and a convergence framework with binding fiscal criteria. Niger, the third AES member, also held WAEMU membership. Their withdrawal from ECOWAS does not automatically dissolve WAEMU obligations, creating a legally ambiguous overlap that the Confederation has yet to publicly resolve.
ECOWAS, for its part, maintains the ECOWAS Trade Liberalization Scheme, a common external tariff, and a protocol on the free movement of persons that has shaped intra-regional commerce for decades. Burkina Faso’s trade with its ECOWAS neighbors, particularly Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, remains structurally significant. Landlocked and dependent on southern corridors for imports including fuel and manufactured goods, Burkina Faso faces real logistical and commercial costs if the AES fails to negotiate functional trade arrangements with the ECOWAS rump.
The AES roadmap’s development pillar must therefore address not just internal integration among three economies, but the terms of economic engagement with a broader West African market from which the three states have formally distanced themselves politically. That is a governance challenge with direct consequences for household prices, business investment, and fiscal revenue in all three countries.
What are the implications for West African integration and investor confidence?
For the broader West African integration project, the AES’s trajectory matters in two distinct ways. First, it tests whether a sub-regional bloc organized around security cooperation and sovereignty claims can develop the economic and institutional depth needed to sustain itself. If the AES fails to deliver on its development pillar, the political cost will fall on governments that have already foreclosed the option of returning to ECOWAS without significant diplomatic concessions.
Second, the AES’s emergence complicates the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) across the Sahel. AfCFTA, which entered its operational phase in 2021, depends on functioning national and regional trade institutions to manage tariff schedules, rules of origin, and dispute resolution. A Confederation still struggling with basic roadmap execution and financial resource mobilization is poorly positioned to absorb AfCFTA’s technical demands, potentially widening the implementation gap between Sahel economies and more institutionally capable peers like Senegal, Ghana, or Côte d’Ivoire.
For investors, the signals are mixed. The AES’s security cooperation framework has demonstrated operational relevance in a region where non-state armed groups have degraded state authority across large territories. A more stable security environment, if the defense pillar delivers, could reduce the risk premium attached to investment in extractive industries, agriculture, and infrastructure in the three countries. However, the institutional opacity of the new bloc, the absence of an independent monetary authority, and unresolved questions about trade arrangements with ECOWAS members introduce regulatory uncertainty that most capital allocators will price conservatively.
What should the AES’s institutions do now?
The commission’s own recommendations point toward the necessary priorities: earlier financial planning, stronger inter-state coordination, and more rigorous monitoring. Translating these into practice requires the AES to move beyond declaratory governance and build functional secretariat capacity with real administrative authority over budget planning and program oversight.
Clarifying the bloc’s relationship with WAEMU is equally urgent. Burkina Faso and Mali cannot credibly operate a new confederation while remaining embedded in a monetary union governed by a separate regional framework with its own convergence criteria and institutional hierarchy. Either the AES develops a monetary cooperation mechanism of its own, or it negotiates a formal modus vivendi with WAEMU. The current ambiguity serves neither institutional framework well.
The AES also needs to formalize its trade relationship with ECOWAS member states. Burkina Faso’s dependence on Ivorian and Ghanaian transit routes is not a political preference but a geographic reality. A governance framework that ignores this dependence will find its development pillar undermined by supply chain disruptions and rising import costs, regardless of political solidarity among the three heads of state.
Thursday’s review demonstrates that the AES’s leadership is at least engaging in the kind of structured self-assessment that functional institutions require. Whether that process produces the administrative reforms and resource commitments the roadmap demands remains the central governance question for the Confederation in the year ahead.
