The ECOWAS Regional Competition Authority (ERCA) has joined the Stanford Computational Antitrust project today. We are delighted to welcome them.

The ERCA is the competition agencies of the Economic Community of West African States. It covers fifteen Member States across West Africa (Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo) and operates from Gambia. It handles mergers, anticompetitive practices, and is now developing a regional framework on consumer protection. In short, it is building competition enforcement at continental scale. That is no small task.

The Stanford Computational Antitrust project now brings together over 70 competition agencies from around the world. The ambition is straightforward, that is, help agencies understand and use computational tools in competition analysis and enforcement. The network grows because the need is real. Digital markets do not wait for institutions to catch up.

The ERCA will contribute to our research reports and feed into the collective body of knowledge we are building. We will connect them with peer agencies in the network, some facing similar institutional contexts, others offering tools and experience ERCA can build on. We look forward to workshops and training sessions together. More than that, we look forward to learning from them. West Africa’s telecommunications, digital platforms, and cross-border trade markets raise competition questions that computational tools are well-suited to address.

The project is stronger for this addition. Welcome.