Burkina Faso — Transitional Authorities → ECOWAS

Summary

Burkina Faso imports 98 per cent of its merchandise by sea and moves it inland by road through four corridors, from Lomé, Abidjan, Cotonou and Tema — all in ECOWAS states, and all still open after the January 2025 withdrawal because the bloc kept the free trade zone in place until further notice. The Ouagadougou–Lomé axis carries roughly 40 per cent of all cargo entering the country, and the Abidjan–Ouagadougou route runs 1,150 kilometres with rail moving around 900,000 tonnes a year. The decisive fact is not the volume but the storage: hydrocarbon import and storage are a state monopoly whose strategic stocks sit outside national territory, in Lomé, Cotonou, Tema, Bolgatanga and Côte d'Ivoire. A landlocked state that keeps its fuel reserve on someone else's ground negotiates from that position in everything.

Why it matters

It is the sharpest illustration in the module of what leaving an institution does and does not change. Burkina Faso gave up its vote over the rules governing five coastal states and kept a fuel reserve physically held in four of them — which means its sovereigntist position and its energy security point in opposite directions.

Systems it depends on

Canonical logistics records. They carry the corridors, nodes, dependence and disruption history that this relationship rests on and does not restate.

What remains unknown

• Corridor mechanics, node roles and disruption history are held in the logistics record and are not restated here.
• ECOWAS has kept the free trade zone in place "until further notice"; no source establishes what would end that.
• `validFrom` is the January 2025 withdrawal, from which this record dates the dependence as a post-membership condition. The corridor geography is older.