How the Passport and Investor ID Would Work
The two operational pieces are the passport and the single investor identity, because they attack the frictions that keep West African markets separate today. Under the passport, an issuer that clears the requirements of one participating regulator would be recognised by the rest, removing the repeated approvals that make a multi country offer slow and expensive relative to what most regional issuers can raise. The unified identity applies the same logic to the buy side: an investor verified in one market could buy bonds and equities across the region without repeating onboarding in every country.
Connected settlement is what would make those permissions usable in practice. Oyedele said trading, settlement and payment infrastructure should be linked so cross border transactions can settle directly, and he pointed to three existing initiatives as the foundation: the West African Capital Markets Integration Council, the African Exchanges Linkage Project and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. The proposal joins pieces that already exist into one framework, which is why it can be judged on regulatory follow through rather than on construction timelines.
Why Scale Is the Argument
The economic case rests on depth. Oyedele argued that no individual West African market is deep enough on its own to attract the volume of long term investment the region needs, and the structure of the bloc reflects that diagnosis. Nigeria and Ghana bring the region's two largest anglophone exchanges, while the eight francophone members already share a currency, a central bank and a regional bourse, so the problem is mainly about connecting two regulatory systems rather than ten unrelated ones.
The bond index and the credit enhancement facility aim at the same constraint from the investor side. A regional local currency bond index would give global funds a single benchmark instead of a set of small national curves, and a guarantee facility would lower the perceived risk of cross border projects too large for one shallow market to fund alone. Both only work if the underlying markets are genuinely fungible, which returns the plan to the passport: without mutual recognition, an index measures markets that capital still cannot move between freely.
That is the test the proposal now faces. Ten governments, their regulators, exchanges and central banks have to align rules on issuance, registration, trading and settlement before any headline benefit reaches a single issuer, and regional summit proposals have stalled at that stage before. The first evidence that this one is real will be narrower than the $1 trillion target: a signed mutual recognition arrangement between Nigeria, Ghana and the francophone bloc, with the passport rules written down.
