ECOWAS

This acronym puzzled me for months (Echoas, Echoise, Eckowass, I tried them all). Today's a day to say "Aha!". From Wikipedia:

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a regional group of fifteen West African countries, founded on May 28, 1975, with the signing of the Treaty of Lagos. Its mission is to promote economic integration. In 1976 Cape Verde joined ECOWAS, and in December 2000 Mauritania withdrew, having announced its intention to do so in December 1999.

It was founded to achieve "collective self-sufficiency" for the member states by means of economic and monetary union creating a single large trading bloc. The very slow progress towards this aim meant that the treaty was revised in Cotonou on July 24, 1993, towards a looser collaboration. The ECOWAS Secretariat and the Fund for Cooperation, Compensation and Development are its two main institutions to implement policies. The ECOWAS Fund was transformed into the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development in 2001. ECOWAS is one of the pillars of the African Economic Community (AEC).
The current President of the Commission is James Victor Gbeho. The current chairman is acting President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria.
It operates officially in three coequal languages (English, French, and Portuguese).

Official Website.

The Sahara Desert

• The Sahara ("The Greatest Desert") is the world's largest hot desert.
• At over 9,000,000 square kilometers (3,500,000 sq mi), it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as the United States or the continent of Europe.
• The desert stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean.
• The Sahara divides the continent of Africa into North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
• To the south, it is delimited by the Sahel: a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna that comprises the northern region of central and western Sub-Saharan Africa.
• The Sahara covers huge parts of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia.
• Here's a beautiful image of the Sahara.
• Read more here.