Soft Power Before Hard Power: What Türkiye's Charity Foundations Are Really Building In The West African Sub region

Across West Africa, from the Sahelian interior of Mali and Niger to the coastal states of Ghana, Togo and Nigeria, a common pattern has quietly repeated itself over the past two decades. A Turkish-funded mosque or school appears in a city. A development agency drills boreholes and renovates clinics. Scholarships send local students to Istanbul and Ankara.

Trade delegations follow. Only later, often years later, does a defence attaché arrive, a drone deal gets signed, or a military cooperation protocol lands on a president's desk. This is not coincidence. It is the deliberate architecture of Turkish influence-building on the continent, and the West African sub region has become one of its most active theatres.

The religious and humanitarian foundation

The earliest and most visible layer of this architecture is religious philanthropy. Türkiye's Diyanet, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, has funded and built landmark mosques across the sub region, including the National Mosque in Accra, modeled on Istanbul's Blue Mosque.

Foundations such as the Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi Foundation, operating locally as Hudai, extend this religious diplomacy into humanitarian work, from Ramadan food distribution to community support programmes.

These gestures are framed as fraternal rather than transactional, drawing on shared Islamic heritage across much of the sub region’s Muslim-majority north and coastal Muslim communities, and they generate a form of goodwill that is difficult for rival powers to replicate quickly.

The educational architecture
Parallel to the mosques sits an increasingly dense network of schools. The Turkish Maarif Foundation, created by the Turkish state in 2016 specifically to absorb institutions previously linked to the Gülen movement following that year's failed coup, now operates in more than two dozen African countries, including Chad, Gabon, The Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and beyond, alongside its presence in Ghana.

State scholarships bring tens of thousands of African students to Turkish universities, cultivating a generation of West African graduates whose formative intellectual and professional networks run through Istanbul and Ankara rather than Paris or London, a deliberate rebalancing of the elite pipelines that once ran exclusively toward former colonial capitals.

The development and infrastructure layer

The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, TIKA, supplies the technical and financial substance beneath the religious and educational goodwill. TIKA runs coordination offices across the continent implementing projects in health, agriculture, irrigation and infrastructure in countries including Senegal, Chad, Niger and Togo.

Turkish construction and engineering firms have gone further still, building sovereign landmarks once reserved for French contractors: a national stadium and arena in Senegal, an international airport terminal in Dakar, ports and hospitals across the sub region. Each of these projects functions simultaneously as development assistance and as a permanent, physical inscription of Turkish presence into the visible fabric of national infrastructure.

The economic pivot
Trade converts this accumulated goodwill into commercial substance. Türkiye-Africa trade has grown from roughly four billion United States dollars at the start of the Erdoğan era to figures now approaching forty billion. Turkish Airlines has become one of the continent's dominant carriers, making Istanbul a transit hub between West Africa and the wider world.

Trade forums, business councils and chambers of commerce, several dozen of which now operate across the continent, translate diplomatic warmth into contracts, positioning Turkish manufacturers as preferred suppliers precisely because the relationship-building groundwork was laid years earlier through the mosque, the school and the clinic.

The pivot to hard power
It is only after these layers are established that defence relationships typically follow, and they follow with striking speed once the door opens. Türkiye has signed defence and security agreements with more than twenty-five African countries, and its drone manufacturer Baykar counts Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and others across the sub region among its clients.

The pattern in the Sahel has been especially rapid: when French forces withdrew from Mali in 2022 amid the deterioration of relations with Bamako's junta, a Turkish delegation arrived within weeks, followed shortly after by Bayraktar TB2 drone deliveries. Niger signed an arms package in 2022 that included Bayraktar drones, Hürkuş light attack aircraft and armored vehicles, later formalized through a military financial cooperation agreement in 2025 and a training support protocol in 2026.

Nigeria and Togo now jointly use Turkish drones to patrol their shared borders with Burkina Faso and Niger against extremist incursions. Ghana's own military cooperation agreement with Ankara dates to 2011, and its armed forces have since taken delivery of Baykar unmanned aerial systems.

Why the drone comes last, not first
Analysts who track this pattern note that the Bayraktar TB2 has become something close to a diplomatic totem in parts of the sub region, its delivery ceremonies staged and photographed as symbols of sovereignty reclaimed from former colonial patrons rather than merely as arms transactions.

The affordability of the platform, a fraction of the cost of comparable American or European systems, and Ankara's comparatively unrestricted export posture, free of the human rights conditionality’s that often accompany Western arms sales, make it an attractive option for governments confronting insurgencies with constrained defence budgets.

But the drone's political value depends entirely on the reservoir of trust the earlier layers have already built. A defence relationship offered without that foundation would read as opportunism. Offered after a decade of mosques, scholarships and boreholes, it reads as partnership.

The strategic reading
None of this makes Turkish engagement in West Africa predatory in the manner of extractive colonial relationships, and Ankara has been notably successful in positioning itself as a Global South partner unburdened by that history. But the sub region’s governments should read the sequence for what it is: a coherent, patient strategy in which every layer reinforces the next, culminating in defence and security arrangements that carry lasting strategic weight. West African states engaging with Türkiye would do well to treat each layer, from the mosque to the drone, as a deliberate negotiation rather than simply as goodwill received.

Conclusion
The mosque, the school, the borehole, the airport terminal and the drone belong to a single continuous strategy rather than a scattered set of unrelated gestures. Türkiye has understood, more clearly than most external powers currently competing for influence in West Africa that hard power built without a soft power foundation is fragile, while soft power that never matures into strategic partnership is merely charity. The sub region’s task is to engage this architecture with open eyes, extracting genuine developmental and security value from it while remaining alert to what Ankara is, in the same motion, building for itself.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

[email protected]
+233-555-275-880
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