Two recent meetings brought together stakeholders from across the region and an action plan emerged
At the end of October, Member States of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)* and representatives from the West Africa Telecommunications Regulators Assembly met to discuss building a unified telecoms market across the region.
The aim would be prevent roaming and other digital fraud, and standardise roaming tariffs between ECOWAS member states.
This meeting followed one in mid-October, which was the twelfth meeting on the focal points of implementing ECOWAS roaming regulation. It was attended by national regulatory authorities (NRAs) as well as the WATRA Secretariat. This gathering took place in Abuja, Nigeria, on the ‘sidelines’ of a training workshop about International Roaming, facilitated by SMARTAfrica.
Yaw Boamah Baafi took the opportunity to reinforce the call for urgent action regarding the roaming regulation**. He restated Ghana’s commitment to implementing the regulation and commended Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire for putting it into practice between the two countries.
At the end of the meeting, members states made the following key recommendations to ECOWAS and the West Africa Telecommunications Regulators Assembly (WATRA) to:
• adopt the regional anti-fraud monitoring framework proposed by the anti-fraud Committee
• explore the possibility of establishing a hub or single carrier solution involving all mobile operators in the sub-region
• explore the possibility of sharing a single direct link between mobile operators within two
countries to exchange inter-community roaming traffic
• begin the review process for the ECOWAS regulation
• maintain a repository of existing bilateral Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) within the framework of the roaming regulation’s implementation
• develop guidelines for NRAs to speedily implement the regulation.
The meeting also recommended that Ghana establish a contact list of fraud monitoring focal points in each NRA to address known fraud issues.
Shortly after this meeting, Benin and Togo signed an MoU enabling free international roaming between the two countries.
* ECOWAS’ member states are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
**He is the Head of Delegation and Focal Point on the Implementation of the ECOWAS Regulation Committee, a Deputy Director at the National Communications Authority (NCA) and Deputy Chairperson for Ghana’s ECOWAS Roaming Implementation Committee.