West Africa Ivory Coast, and a succession of military coups in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Since the end of colonialism, the region has been the stage for some brutal conflicts, including: The Economic Community of West African States, established in May 1975, has defined the region of West Africa since 1999 as including the following 15 states: Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Western Africa includes the preceding states with the addition of Mauritania (which withdrew from ECOWAS in 1999), comprising an area of approximately 6.1 million square km. The UN region also includes the island of Saint Helena, a British overseas
Church of the Province of West Africa in the other seven nations. For this reason actions are in hand to move towards making Ghana a separate province. The country already has the status of an "internal province", the archbishop of which is currently (2015) the Primate of the whole Province of West Africa. Today, the church has to survive in areas of civil unrest where Christians remain a small minority. Today, there are over one million Anglicans out of an estimated population of 35 million. The polity of the Church of the Province of West Africa is episcopal church governance, which is the same as other Anglican