The military-led governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger announced a phased roadmap on Tuesday for a shared currency intended to replace the CFA franc within their borders, marking the boldest step yet by the Alliance of Sahel States to detach from the regional financial architecture overseen by their West African neighbors. The plan, unveiled at a joint communique read in Bamako, would create a transitional unit of account by early 2027 and a full circulating currency, tentatively named the “Sahel,” by the end of 2028.

The announcement followed a two-day summit of the alliance’s three heads of state, with Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goita serving as chair. In remarks delivered alongside Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré and Niger’s General Abdourahamane Tiani, Goita said the proposed currency would be “an instrument of liberation” from what he described as a colonial monetary arrangement. The communique did not specify whether the new currency would be pegged to a basket of foreign units, backed by gold and natural resource revenues, or allowed to float — a central design question that the three governments said would be resolved in a technical convention scheduled for July in Niamey.

The CFA franc, used by 14 African countries across two regional blocs, has been pegged to the euro since 1999 and is guaranteed by the French Treasury under arrangements that the Sahel juntas have long denounced as residual colonialism. Departure from the West African CFA zone has been discussed for years, but Tuesday’s announcement represented the first concrete timeline put forward by member states intent on actually leaving. Whether the three governments have the institutional capacity to design, print and manage a credible currency on the proposed schedule was treated with open skepticism by outside economists.

“There is a meaningful difference between declaring monetary sovereignty and operating it,” said Dr. Aisha Konaté, a Dakar-based development economist who has advised several West African central banks. “A currency requires a central bank with credibility, foreign reserves to defend it, payment infrastructure that the public trusts and a fiscal posture that does not require constant emergency printing. None of those elements are obviously in place.” Konaté said the most plausible near-term outcome was a partially convertible unit used for inter-alliance trade alongside continued informal circulation of CFA francs and U.S. dollars.

The Economic Community of West African States, from which the three countries formally withdrew in January after a year of mutual recriminations, responded sharply. ECOWAS Commission President Omar Touray said in a statement from Abuja that the alliance’s currency proposal was “not coordinated with regional financial institutions, not informed by technical consultation, and not in the interest of populations who depend on cross-border commerce.” He warned that any unilateral demonetization of the CFA franc within Mali, Burkina Faso or Niger could “produce immediate harm to traders, pensioners and savers” and called on the three governments to engage in a structured dialogue before further action.

French officials reacted with notable restraint. A spokesperson for the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, Pauline Mercier, said Paris was “monitoring the announcement” and would consult with West African partners but declined to characterize the plan as either provocative or unworkable. French officials have spent the past two years deliberately reducing their visible role in CFA franc governance — including a 2024 reform that removed French representatives from key board seats — and several analysts said Paris had little appetite for a public confrontation that would only reinforce the juntas’ anticolonial messaging.

The proposal arrived against the backdrop of Burkina Faso’s adoption of a Revolution Charter in late March, which formalized junta rule in Ouagadougou indefinitely, and a steady deepening of security ties among the three countries. Russian private military contractors continue to operate in all three states, and a defense protocol signed at Tuesday’s summit committed the alliance to joint procurement of small arms and unmanned aerial systems through an unnamed third-country intermediary. Diplomats in the region said they understood the intermediary to be the United Arab Emirates, though no government has confirmed that publicly.

Bamako-based analyst Souleymane Diallo, who runs a small policy research group, said the currency announcement should be understood primarily as a political signal rather than an imminent monetary reality. “The Sahel currency, if and when it appears, will function the way the alliance flag functions — as a marker of belonging, as a way of telling populations that their government is doing something dramatic,” Diallo said in a phone interview. “Whether shopkeepers in Gao or Dori will use it for daily transactions in 2028 is a different question entirely.”

Markets in the region offered an ambiguous verdict. The CFA franc is not freely traded, so direct currency price effects were limited, but yields on the small volume of outstanding Malian and Burkinabe sovereign bonds in regional markets ticked higher Tuesday afternoon, and informal money changers in Niamey reported wider spreads between CFA francs and the U.S. dollar. Officials at the Bamako-based Banque Centrale, an institution the alliance has proposed to expand into a full Sahel central bank, declined to answer questions about reserves or the legal status of CFA-denominated deposits under the new framework.

Within the three countries, public reception was difficult to gauge independently given press restrictions, but state media in each capital led their evening broadcasts with extended coverage describing the announcement in triumphant terms. Civil society representatives in exile in Abidjan and Dakar said in interviews that ordinary citizens were more concerned with insecurity, food prices and electricity supply than with monetary architecture, and that the announcement risked diverting state attention from those acute problems.

The alliance said its finance ministers would meet again in Ouagadougou next month to begin drafting the statute of a Sahel central bank, and that a technical secretariat would be established in Niamey by July. A French diplomatic official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Paris and several ECOWAS capitals would coordinate quietly in the coming weeks to assess what tools — if any — remained available to shape the outcome, and that further responses would be considered after the July technical meeting.