A clear guide to Africa's regional trade blocs: who belongs to ECOWAS, EAC, SADC, COMESA, ECCAS and others, how they work, why they overlap and how they link to AfCFTA.
One country, four trade groups
In this section
For anyone trying to understand how goods move across African borders, the result can look like a tangle of acronyms.
The Democratic Republic of Congo belongs to four of the eight regional economic communities recognised by the African Union. It is a member of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) and, since 2022, the East African Community (EAC).
Each of these groups has its own treaty, its own secretariat, its own rules on tariffs and its own rules on which goods count as "local". A business shipping goods from Kinshasa to Lusaka may follow one set of rules, while a business shipping from Goma to Kampala may follow another.
The DRC is not unusual. Most African countries belong to at least two regional groups, and some belong to three or four. On top of these arrangements sits the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the continent-wide agreement designed to bring African economies into a single market. As of September 2026, 50 countries had ratified the agreement.
For anyone trying to understand how goods move across African borders, the result can look like a tangle of acronyms.
In the first post of this series, How to Read an African Economy, we looked at the numbers used to describe a single economy. This post looks at the groups that connect those economies to each other. The aim is to make the acronyms readable, so that when a country profile says a country is in SADC but not SACU, or in ECOWAS but uses the CFA franc, it means something.
There is a membership table at the end that you can come back to as the series goes on.
What a trade bloc is
In this section
When our country profiles say a country belongs to a bloc, we will also say what that membership means on the ground.
A trade bloc is a group of countries that agree to treat each other's goods, and sometimes each other's people, money and services, differently from those of outsiders.
The simplest version is an agreement to charge lower import taxes on goods from fellow members. The most advanced version is a shared currency managed by a shared central bank. Between these two ends, economists usually describe a ladder of steps.
The first step is a preferential trade area, where members cut some tariffs on some goods from each other but not all. COMESA began life in 1981 as the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa before becoming a common market in name in 1994.
The second step is a free trade area. Members remove most tariffs on goods traded among themselves, but each country keeps its own tariffs on goods from outside.
Because outside tariffs differ, a free trade area needs rules of origin. These are the rules that decide whether a product really "comes from" a member country and therefore qualifies for preferential or duty-free entry.
Without them, a trader could import shoes into the member with the lowest tariff on shoes and then send them tariff-free to another member. Rules of origin usually require that a product be wholly made in the member country, or that it be changed enough there, for example through a set share of local value or a change in its customs classification.
For businesses, rules of origin are often where trade agreements become complicated in practice. They mean paperwork, certificates and sometimes changes to where inputs are bought.
The third step is a customs union. Members keep free trade among themselves and also agree on a common external tariff: the same import tax on goods from outside, regardless of which member's port they arrive at.
Once outside tariffs are the same, there is less need to check origin at internal borders, and members can negotiate some trade arrangements with the rest of the world as a group. The Southern African Customs Union, or SACU, dates to 1910.
The fourth step is a common market, which adds the free movement of people, services and capital to free movement of goods. In a common market, a nurse from one member can work in another, a bank can open branches across borders and investors can move money more freely.
Many African blocs have signed common market protocols, but putting them fully into practice has often been slower than signing them.
The fifth step is an economic and monetary union, where members share a currency and coordinate their economic policies. Africa has two major working examples in the West and Central African CFA franc zones, which are covered in more detail below.
A bloc's treaty ambitions and what businesses can actually use at the border are not always the same. Several African communities describe themselves as common markets or plan monetary unions while still working to complete their free trade arrangements.
When our country profiles say a country belongs to a bloc, we will also say what that membership means on the ground.
The eight communities the African Union recognises
In this section
COMESA, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
The African Union treats eight regional economic communities, often shortened to RECs, as the building blocks of a future continental market. They are listed here roughly from west to east and north to south, with what each one has achieved so far.
ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States. Founded in 1975 by the Treaty of Lagos, ECOWAS is one of the oldest and most active blocs on the continent.
Following the withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in January 2025, ECOWAS has 12 members: Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
Its trade liberalisation scheme, known as ETLS, allows qualifying goods made in member states to cross borders without import duty, and it adopted a common external tariff in 2015.
ECOWAS is also known for its free movement arrangements. Citizens of member states can generally travel within the community without a visa for short stays, subject to the applicable rules, and the bloc has its own regional passport.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger formally left ECOWAS on 29 January 2025. Their continuing trade arrangements with the remaining ECOWAS members are discussed below.
ECCAS, the Economic Community of Central African States. Established in 1983, ECCAS has traditionally had 11 members: Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Rwanda and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Rwanda announced its intention to withdraw from ECCAS after the June 2025 Malabo summit, citing the bloc's handling of its turn to hold the rotating presidency. Because the formal status of that withdrawal is not yet clear, Rwanda is marked separately in the table below.
ECCAS's trade integration has moved more slowly than that of ECOWAS or the EAC, partly because of weak transport links across the Congo Basin and conflict in several member states. Six of its members also form CEMAC, a tighter customs and monetary union discussed below.
AMU, the Arab Maghreb Union. Created in 1989, the AMU groups Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.
It is largely inactive. Political tension between Algeria and Morocco, including a land border that has been closed since 1994, has prevented the union from making much progress on regional integration.
North African countries trade with each other through other arrangements, including COMESA and AfCFTA, while their trade with Europe remains much larger than their trade with one another.
CEN-SAD, the Community of Sahel-Saharan States. Founded in 1998 with Libyan backing, CEN-SAD brings together more than 20 countries stretching across the Sahel and parts of North, West, Central and East Africa.
Its work has included economic, political and security cooperation, but it does not currently provide the kind of functioning free trade framework found in blocs such as EAC or COMESA.
IGAD, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development. IGAD covers the Horn of Africa and the upper Nile region.
Its current members are Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda. Eritrea suspended its membership in April 2007, reactivated it in 2023 and formally withdrew again in December 2025.
IGAD's main work has been in peace mediation, drought response and food security rather than tariff cutting, although it has also worked on regional movement of people.
EAC, the East African Community. The EAC in its current form was re-established in 2000 by Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, after an earlier version collapsed in 1977.
It has since grown to eight members: Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Somalia was the latest to join, in 2024.
The EAC is generally seen as one of the most deeply integrated of Africa's larger RECs. It has had a customs union with a common external tariff since 2005 and a common market protocol since 2010.
It has also worked on shared infrastructure such as one-stop border posts, which allow trucks to complete customs procedures for two countries at the same border crossing. Citizens of some member states can also travel to others using national identity cards.
COMESA, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. With 21 members, COMESA stretches from Tunisia and Egypt in the north to Eswatini in the south.
Its members are Burundi, Comoros, the DRC, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Most members trade under its free trade area, launched in 2000, although membership of COMESA does not automatically mean participation in the FTA.
COMESA has also built practical trade tools, including a simplified trade regime for some small cross-border traders, a regional customs bond guarantee for transit cargo and a yellow card system for vehicle insurance across borders.
SADC, the Southern African Development Community. SADC has 16 members: Angola, Botswana, Comoros, the DRC, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Its free trade area launched in 2008. The bloc has also worked on infrastructure, industrial development and regional transport links, making it an important framework for trade across Southern Africa.
The smaller unions that do much of the practical work
In this section
WAEMU, the West African Economic and Monetary Union, known by its French initials UEMOA.
The eight RECs get most of the attention, but three smaller groups inside them are among the most integrated arrangements on the continent. They matter a great deal for anyone trading in the countries they cover.
SACU, the Southern African Customs Union. SACU was established in 1910, making it the oldest customs union still operating.
Its members are Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa. Goods move between them without import duty, and all five apply the same tariff on goods from outside.
What makes SACU unusual is how it handles the money. Customs and excise duties collected by all five members go into a common revenue pool, which is then shared using a formula.
Because most goods entering the region arrive through South African ports, and because the smaller members import a great deal from South Africa, the pool is an important source of government revenue for Lesotho and Eswatini.
Lesotho, Eswatini and Namibia also participate in the Common Monetary Area, which links their currencies to the South African rand. The rand circulates alongside their own currencies in the relevant countries.
WAEMU, the West African Economic and Monetary Union, known by its French initials UEMOA.
WAEMU has eight members: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.
They share a customs union and the West African CFA franc, issued by a common central bank, the BCEAO, headquartered in Dakar. The currency is pegged to the euro at a fixed rate of 655.957 CFA francs per euro.
In December 2019, member governments and France announced reforms that ended the requirement to hold half of the union's foreign reserves at the French Treasury and removed French representatives from the central bank's governing bodies. The reforms also included a plan to rename the currency the Eco.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have remained in WAEMU and continue to use the CFA franc, even after leaving ECOWAS.
CEMAC, the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa. CEMAC is the Central African counterpart.
Its six members are Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.
They use the Central African CFA franc, issued by the BEAC in Yaoundé, also pegged to the euro at the same rate. The two CFA francs have equal value but are separate currencies, and one is not legal tender in the other zone.
These unions matter for business in practical ways.
Inside SACU, a South African manufacturer can sell into Namibia or Botswana without facing an import tariff at the internal border. Inside the CFA zones, a company operating across several member countries does not face exchange-rate movements between those countries because they share a common currency.
The trade-off is that members have less room to conduct independent monetary policy, particularly where currencies are fixed to an external currency such as the euro.
Why memberships overlap, and why it matters
In this section
Belonging to several blocs gives a country access to several markets, and the blocs can act as bridges.
Africa's blocs overlap because they were formed at different times for different reasons.
Some grew out of colonial-era arrangements, such as SACU and the CFA zones. Some were set up for trade, some for security or drought response, and some for political cooperation.
Countries joined groups that served their interests at the time, and few left simply because another regional organisation later emerged.
Over decades, this built up into the pattern economists call a "spaghetti bowl", a term used to describe a tangle of overlapping trade agreements.
The overlap is easy to see in East and Southern Africa.
Kenya is in the EAC, COMESA and IGAD, as well as CEN-SAD. Tanzania is in the EAC and SADC and left COMESA. Zambia and Zimbabwe are in both COMESA and SADC. The DRC, as we saw at the start, is in four RECs.
Overlap creates three practical problems.
The first concerns customs unions. A country can belong to many free trade areas, but it cannot logically apply two different common external tariffs to the same imports at the same time.
Tanzania, for example, applies the EAC common external tariff. If another bloc develops a different customs-union tariff, Tanzania has to manage the resulting obligations carefully.
The second problem is rules of origin.
Each trade agreement has its own rules for deciding where a product comes from. A clothing factory in Zambia exporting to Kenya may use COMESA rules, while the same factory exporting to Tanzania would need to consider the applicable SADC rules. The two agreements may treat imported fabric or local processing differently.
For a small business, keeping track of which certificate and which rule applies to which buyer adds cost and administrative work.
The third problem is capacity.
Each membership comes with meetings, reporting duties, annual contributions to a secretariat and commitments to implement. Governments with limited trade staff have to spread their people across several organisations, which can slow the work of putting agreements into practice.
There are also benefits to overlap.
Belonging to several blocs gives a country access to several markets, and the blocs can act as bridges. Kenya's membership of both the EAC and COMESA, for example, gives Kenyan exporters preferential access to other EAC markets and to COMESA markets such as Egypt and Zambia.
The question for the continent has been how to keep the benefits while reducing the confusion.
Two of the biggest answers so far are the Tripartite Free Trade Area and AfCFTA.
How the map has changed since 2022
In this section
The DRC's entry extended the bloc to the Atlantic coast and added one of Africa's largest mineral economies.
The membership of Africa's blocs is not fixed, and several changes in the last few years affect how trade works today.
The Sahel states left ECOWAS
On 29 January 2025, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger formally withdrew from ECOWAS, a year after announcing their decision.
Relations had broken down after military governments took power in all three countries and ECOWAS responded with sanctions and, after the July 2023 coup in Niger, a threat of military intervention.
The three countries had already formed their own grouping, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), in September 2023, beginning as a defence pact and later adding plans for closer political and economic cooperation.
ECOWAS said its remaining members should continue to recognise passports and identity documents issued by the three countries and continue applying its trade arrangements to their goods while new arrangements were worked out.
That does not mean trade relations have remained completely unchanged.
In March 2025, the AES countries adopted a 0.5% community levy on imports from non-AES countries, excluding WAEMU countries. The levy replaced a similar ECOWAS levy that had previously applied to imports.
For businesses trading between the AES and ECOWAS, the practical situation is therefore more complicated than simply continuing under the old ECOWAS rules.
The three AES countries are also landlocked and depend heavily on transport corridors through coastal neighbours such as Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Ghana and Benin. At the same time, they remain members of WAEMU and continue to use the West African CFA franc.
The EAC grew eastward and westward
The DRC joined the EAC in 2022 and Somalia in 2024, bringing membership to eight.
The DRC's entry extended the bloc to the Atlantic coast and added one of Africa's largest mineral economies. Somalia added a long Indian Ocean coastline and a strategic connection to the Horn of Africa.
Both countries are still working through the practical process of applying EAC rules, and conflict in eastern DRC has strained relations between the DRC and Rwanda, both EAC members.
The Tripartite Free Trade Area came into force
In 2008, COMESA, the EAC and SADC agreed to build a single free trade area across all three blocs, partly to deal with overlapping memberships.
The agreement was signed in 2015 and came into force on 25 July 2024, after Angola became the 14th country to ratify it.
It covers 29 member and partner states stretching from Egypt and Libya to South Africa. Together, those countries have a population of about 800 million and account for more than half of African Union membership.
The states that had ratified the agreement when it came into force accounted for about three quarters of the group's GDP.
The agreement is now in force, but its practical implementation still depends on members completing their tariff schedules and applying the agreed rules. Its importance is that it provides a framework connecting the three major regional blocs and creates another bridge toward AfCFTA.
Eritrea left IGAD again
Eritrea suspended its IGAD membership in 2007, reactivated it in 2023 and withdrew again in December 2025.
The withdrawal has limited direct trade implications because Eritrea's formal trade with neighbouring countries remains relatively small, but it changes the institutional map of the Horn of Africa.
Where AfCFTA fits
In this section
The original eight participating countries were Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania and Tunisia.
The African Continental Free Trade Area was signed in Kigali in March 2018 and came into force on 30 May 2019. Trading under it officially began on 1 January 2021, and its secretariat is based in Accra.
Every African Union member except Eritrea has signed it.
As of September 2026, 50 countries had ratified the agreement. Among the 54 countries listed in the table below, Benin, Libya, South Sudan and Sudan had signed but not ratified, while Eritrea had not signed.
The 50-country continental ratification figure includes the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which is not included as a separate country in the 54-country table used in this article. This is why counting only the countries in the table produces a different number.
Its founding agreement treats the RECs as building blocks of the continental market. Where a REC has already gone further than AfCFTA, for example with a customs union or free movement arrangements, members can retain those deeper arrangements among themselves.
In practice, this means a Kenyan exporter selling to Uganda will usually continue to use EAC rules, while a Kenyan exporter selling to Ghana or Egypt can potentially use AfCFTA preferences where the relevant tariff concessions and procedures are in force.
That second kind of trade, between countries in different blocs, is where AfCFTA adds something new.
Before AfCFTA, a Nigerian manufacturer selling to Kenya or a Moroccan manufacturer selling to Côte d'Ivoire did not have a continent-wide preferential trade agreement to use. Under AfCFTA, members have committed to remove tariffs on 90% of tariff lines over five years, or ten years for least developed countries, with a further 7% of sensitive products receiving longer treatment and up to 3% potentially excluded.
Those commitments only become usable for a particular trade route once the relevant tariff schedule has been approved and implemented domestically. That is why AfCFTA trade has started country by country rather than everywhere at once.
To show that the system could work before every schedule was finished, the secretariat launched the Guided Trade Initiative on 7 October 2022.
The original eight participating countries were Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania and Tunisia.
The initiative provided a controlled way for selected goods to move between participating countries under AfCFTA preferences while implementation was still developing.
One important part of the AfCFTA rulebook has also moved forward. Negotiations on rules of origin for vehicles and for textiles and clothing have been completed, including agreement on a 40% local-content requirement for vehicles. The remaining work in those sectors is around tariff schedules and their implementation, not the rules of origin.
AfCFTA also goes beyond goods.
It includes protocols covering trade in services, investment, competition policy, intellectual property, digital trade, and women and youth in trade, at different stages of adoption and implementation.
Alongside it, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), developed with Afreximbank, aims to allow businesses to make cross-border payments in African currencies without routing every transaction through the US dollar or another intermediary currency.
We looked in detail at whether AfCFTA can deliver on its promise in our Building Africa series, so we will not repeat that analysis here.
For the purpose of reading the country profiles, the key point is that AfCFTA sits alongside the RECs. When we describe a country's trade access, we will note both its REC memberships and its AfCFTA status, including whether the relevant tariff arrangements are in force.
What this means for a business
In this section
The cost of converting between African currencies can still be significant, particularly for smaller businesses.
For someone selling or buying across African borders, bloc membership answers a few concrete questions before any deal is signed.
The first is whether goods can enter duty-free, and under which agreement.
Two countries can share more than one agreement, and the best one to use depends on the product, its tariff and how easily it meets each agreement's rules of origin.
The second is what paperwork the goods need.
Duty-free entry under a trade agreement usually requires proof of origin issued in the exporting country, and sometimes product standards certificates as well. A shipment that qualifies on paper can still face problems at the border if the required documentation is missing or completed incorrectly.
The third is how goods will physically move.
Trade agreements can reduce tariffs, but they do not shorten roads or clear port queues. Landlocked countries such as Uganda, Zambia, Rwanda, Mali and Niger depend on neighbours' ports and transit systems. Rules covering transit bonds, axle-load limits and one-stop border posts can therefore matter almost as much to a business as tariff reductions.
The fourth is currency.
Trading within the CFA zones or the Common Monetary Area removes exchange-rate risk between participating countries. Trading across those zones, or between countries with separate currencies, does not.
The cost of converting between African currencies can still be significant, particularly for smaller businesses.
The fifth is people and services.
Free movement arrangements in ECOWAS and the EAC can make it easier to send staff, visit clients or establish a branch office. Where such arrangements do not apply, visas and work permits become part of the cost of entering a market.
Our ETA Tracker covers entry requirements for all 54 countries.
The blocs also shape the order of this series.
Our country profiles move region by region so that each country can be read alongside the neighbours it trades with most. After each region, we will publish a round-up comparing how its members trade with each other.
Each profile will include a short section on trade agreements, listing the country's REC memberships, any customs or monetary union, its AfCFTA status and what those arrangements mean for a business trying to sell there.
The next and final opening post, Africa's 54 Markets at a Glance, gives a single overview of every economy on the continent, with its size, its main exports and its place on this map of blocs. It will serve as the hub page for the series.
Membership at a glance
In this section
Confirm the formal status with the ECCAS secretariat before treating the withdrawal as completed.
Countries are grouped by African Union region. CEN-SAD is left out because its membership changes often and it does not currently provide a working free trade framework.
"AfCFTA" shows the status used for this article as of September 2026.
Country
AU region
Regional economic communities
Customs or monetary union
AfCFTA
Algeria
North
AMU
None
Ratified
Egypt
North
COMESA
None
Ratified
Libya
North
AMU, COMESA
None
Signed, not ratified
Mauritania
North
AMU
None
Ratified
Morocco
North
AMU
None
Ratified
Tunisia
North
AMU, COMESA
None
Ratified
Benin
West
ECOWAS
WAEMU (CFA franc)
Signed, not ratified
Burkina Faso
West
None of the seven above; left ECOWAS in 2025
WAEMU (CFA franc); AES
Ratified
Cabo Verde
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Côte d'Ivoire
West
ECOWAS
WAEMU (CFA franc)
Ratified
The Gambia
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Ghana
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Guinea
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Guinea-Bissau
West
ECOWAS
WAEMU (CFA franc)
Ratified
Liberia
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Mali
West
None of the seven above; left ECOWAS in 2025
WAEMU (CFA franc); AES
Ratified
Niger
West
None of the seven above; left ECOWAS in 2025
WAEMU (CFA franc); AES
Ratified
Nigeria
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Senegal
West
ECOWAS
WAEMU (CFA franc)
Ratified
Sierra Leone
West
ECOWAS
None
Ratified
Togo
West
ECOWAS
WAEMU (CFA franc)
Ratified
Burundi
Central
EAC, COMESA, ECCAS
None
Ratified
Cameroon
Central
ECCAS
CEMAC (CFA franc)
Ratified
Central African Republic
Central
ECCAS
CEMAC (CFA franc)
Ratified
Chad
Central
ECCAS
CEMAC (CFA franc)
Ratified
Republic of Congo
Central
ECCAS
CEMAC (CFA franc)
Ratified
DR Congo
Central
ECCAS, EAC, COMESA, SADC
None
Ratified
Equatorial Guinea
Central
ECCAS
CEMAC (CFA franc)
Ratified
Gabon
Central
ECCAS
CEMAC (CFA franc)
Ratified
São Tomé and Príncipe
Central
ECCAS
None
Ratified
Comoros
East
COMESA, SADC
None
Ratified
Djibouti
East
IGAD, COMESA
None
Ratified
Eritrea
East
COMESA
None
Not signed
Ethiopia
East
IGAD, COMESA
None
Ratified
Kenya
East
EAC, COMESA, IGAD
None
Ratified
Madagascar
East
COMESA, SADC
None
Ratified
Mauritius
East
COMESA, SADC
None
Ratified
Rwanda
East
EAC, COMESA, ECCAS*
None
Ratified
Seychelles
East
COMESA, SADC
None
Ratified
Somalia
East
EAC, COMESA, IGAD
None
Ratified
South Sudan
East
EAC, IGAD
None
Signed, not ratified
Sudan
East
COMESA, IGAD**
None
Signed, not ratified
Tanzania
East
EAC, SADC
None
Ratified
Uganda
East
EAC, COMESA, IGAD
None
Ratified
Angola
Southern
SADC, ECCAS
None
Ratified
Botswana
Southern
SADC
SACU
Ratified
Eswatini
Southern
SADC, COMESA
SACU; Common Monetary Area
Ratified
Lesotho
Southern
SADC
SACU; Common Monetary Area
Ratified
Malawi
Southern
SADC, COMESA
None
Ratified
Mozambique
Southern
SADC
None
Ratified
Namibia
Southern
SADC
SACU; Common Monetary Area
Ratified
South Africa
Southern
SADC
SACU; Common Monetary Area
Ratified
Zambia
Southern
SADC, COMESA
None
Ratified
Zimbabwe
Southern
SADC, COMESA
None
Ratified
* Rwanda announced its intention to withdraw from ECCAS in 2025. Confirm the formal status with the ECCAS secretariat before treating the withdrawal as completed.
** Sudan suspended its participation in IGAD in January 2024, but remained listed among IGAD's members when Eritrea withdrew in December 2025. Check its status against the latest IGAD position before relying on the membership label.
Membership in a REC does not always mean full participation in its trade arrangements. Some COMESA members, for example, have not joined its free trade area, and membership of a regional organisation does not automatically mean every protocol is fully implemented.
Before relying on a specific tariff, certificate, free-movement arrangement or customs procedure, check its current status with the relevant secretariat or national trade authority.
