“…First, we consider financial deepening due to its power in supporting environmental sustainability through green finance, innovation, and low greenhouse gas emissions while promoting socioeconomic sustainability through the provision of resources to address poverty, inequality, and precarity (Ofori et al 2022d;Bekhet et al, 2017;Weber, 2014;Shahbaz et al, 2013). Our choice of economic integration strategy follows the implementation of the AfCFTA, which as Ofori et al (2022a) and Adeleye et al (2019) reckoned, could prove crucial in addressing Africa's conundrums of poverty, inequality, high informality, and human resource wastage. On the environmental front, while economic integration can trigger innovation and the manufacturing of environmentally-friendly goods to fight climate change (see Opoku & Boachie, 2020), it can also hamper environmental quality of life through pollution/depletion of natural asset bases, especially in the developing world where lapses in environmental regulation are glaring (see Dauda et al, 2021;Nathanael & Iheonu, 2019;Sarkodie & Strezov, 2019).…”