ECOWAS FREE MOVEMENT PROTOCOL DURING A PANDEMIC: AN ASSESSMENT

Abstract

West African states have been gravely affected since the outbreak of the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic began. The socio-economic and political aspects of ECOWAS have been affected because most African states have not been able to curtail the virus and a cure has not yet been found. Therefore, economic activities were suspended for a while, but now states are getting and creating ways by which they could work around the global issue they face because things cannot return to the way they werebefore the virus. The paper focuses on the free movement protocol implemented by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and how the pandemic has affected its activities, how flexible the protocol has been, and how they adapt to the new normal. This paper however, is based solely on secondary sources of data. This paper concludes that due to the corona virus, ECOWAS had to ban the free movement of persons and free trade due to the lack of a conducive end safe environment. This paper notes that West African states under ECOWAS are losing funds due to the ban, and this has been affecting their development.