CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ___________________________________________________________________________ The first regional Ministerial Conference on statelessness in West Africa, which brought together delegates from the 15 ECOWAS countries, discussed key issues related to the theme of the Conference: Preventing new cases of statelessness through law reform Preventing statelessness through civil status registration and access to nationality documents; Political commitments, partnership and information-sharing; Identification of stateless persons; Protection of stateless persons; Solutions for stateless persons and risks of statelessness. The main conclusions and recommendations are the following: GENERAL CONCLUSIONS   1. The ECOWAS Member States are working towards regional solutions to the elimination of statelessness while keeping in mind that it is necessary first to strengthen their national administrative and legislative framework related to nationality; 2. It is essential to find solutions to statelessness which take into account the contemporary realities of West Africa and which are based on the continuity between traditional and modern systems, in particular by taking into account the role of the traditional powers and the social context of illiteracy; 3. We stress the importance of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, and the fact that they retain all their relevance in the 21st century. We also emphasize that two important instruments containing rules for the attribution of nationality, thus participating in the fight against statelessness, have been developed and adopted in the framework of the African Union, namely, the African Charter on Rights and Welfare of the Child and the Protocol on the Right of Women in Africa. 2