Ghana and Burkina Faso have signed seven landmark bilateral agreements to strengthen security collaboration, cross-border governance, and economic integration, following high-level diplomatic talks held in Ouagadougou.
Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, announced the development after a two-day official visit during which he held substantive discussions with Burkina Faso’s Prime Minister, Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo, and Foreign Affairs Minister, Karamoko Jean-Marie Traoré.
This comes a few weeks after Ghana signed a similar agreement in Zambia.
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The talks, described by both sides as “open, forward-looking and impactful,” concluded at the 13th session of the Permanent Joint Commission for Cooperation (PJCC), a bilateral platform that had been dormant for six years before its reactivation.
The reactivation follows earlier meetings between President John Mahama and Burkina Faso’s leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, in January and March last year, signalling renewed high-level political will to strengthen bilateral ties.
Security cooperation took centre stage at the talks. Both governments condemned recent terror attacks in Burkina Faso and agreed to design and adopt a new security framework aimed at neutralising the growing threat of terrorism and violent extremism in the sub-region.
The seven agreements signed cover a broad and critical range of areas: mutual recognition of national driver’s licences; transport and road transit; a framework on cross-border cooperation; periodic consultation mechanisms between border administrative authorities; a joint commission to reaffirm the international boundary; a cooperation agreement on disaster prevention and humanitarian crisis management; and a pact to combat the illicit cultivation, manufacture, and trafficking of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.
The two countries also established a new partnership on disaster management, particularly to address the perennial spillage of the Bagré Dam in Burkina Faso, which has caused severe flooding in downstream communities in northern Ghana, displacing residents and destroying farms and infrastructure.
Trade between the two countries amounted to approximately $764 million in 2024, underlining the economic stakes of deepening bilateral ties. Minister Ablakwa stressed that the agreements would not be “decorative pieces,” pledging swift operationalisation to benefit citizens on both sides of the over 500-kilometre shared border.
