The Role Of ECOWS In DRM For Regional Infrastruture Development In Africa: Rethinking New Partnership

ECOWAS have been playing the role of contributing to the development of member countries and improving regional development and integration. ECOWAS is among the RECs in Africa whose contribution to regional development is expected to lead the region in achieving the vision 2020 and SDGs. This has prompted it to build strategies and mechanism to meet its cardinal objectives which includes creating a borderless region where there will be unrestricted movement of person, goods and services that leads to socio-economic growth. The development objective will be based on five pillars. They are peace and security, policy harmonization, promotion of trade and investment, infrastructure development as well as democracy and good governance. ECOWAS has made some significant progress in meeting its development goal by enacting the harmonization of a custom union, visa free travel to member countries, and a common ECOWAS passport. These policy efforts have helped to boost ECOWAS integration. Despite the remarkable progress made by ECOWAS over four decades, the development of the region and the freedom of movement and exchanges of people, goods and services as well as a globally competitive market has been difficult to achieve. The region is experiencing an infrastructure deficit, which is denying the people of actualizing and benefiting from the pillars of its regional development framework. This is because of funding resource gap that has led to infrastructure deficit in facilitating development and diversifying other economic sectors.Infrastructure deficit is an anathema to ECOWAS economic development. It has pose a serious challenge in the integration experiment of the sub region because it prevented easy access to regional market, reduced the impact of intra trade, create economic constraints and reduced the region’s global competitiveness. One of the major reasons for the infrastructure challenges is a continued lack of development finance which is urgently needed. The ability for ECOWAS to mobilize adequate financial resources from within the sub region to fund infrastructure development is daunting. Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM) has become acceptable by several development experts as one of the surest ways ECOWAS could fill its infrastructure financing gap. This is because external source of development finance is declining as the need to increase financing for infrastructure development is increasing. Thus, to record a successful DRM in order to provide the funding for regional infrastructure development will require some strategic partnership. New opportunities have prevailed for ECOWAS to use DRM through a regional saving strategy to partner with the international community for financing infrastructure development. The regional domestic saving strategy can be achieved in partnership with emerging economies like China.