External debt management in West Africa remains largely retrospective even though repayment pressure, exchange-rate exposure and fiscal vulnerability require forward-looking evidence. This article develops an integrated predictive framework for 16 West African countries over 2010-2023. It combines geographical profiling, country-level associations, language-group comparison, panel stationarity assessment, two-way fixed-effects estimation, quantile-on-quantile analysis and machine-learning prediction. External debt as a percentage of GDP is the principal outcome, while macroeconomic, fiscal, external-sector and governance indicators form the predictor set. The panel contains 224 country-year observations. Average external debt was highest in Cabo Verde (94.90% of GDP), Senegal (71.41%), Burkina Faso (64.89%), Mauritania (64.39%) and Ghana (55.24%); it was lowest in Nigeria (14.55%), Togo (25.31%), Niger (25.95%), Guinea (26.97%) and Sierra Leone (27.39%). Francophone countries averaged 42.06%, compared with 35.07% among Anglophone countries, and the difference was statistically significant (p=0.015). In the two-way fixed-effects model, public and publicly guaranteed debt was the only robust contemporaneous predictor (standardised coefficient=25.88, p<0.001). For next-year prediction, the Huber regression achieved the strongest validation result and retained good performance on the 2022 holdout (MAE=6.32, RMSE=8.69 and R²=0.889). Permutation analysis identified the current debt ratio, country structure, debt service, fiscal balance and language group as the most useful predictive signals. Quantile-on-quantile surfaces further revealed that several relationships change across low-and high-debt states. The findings support country-sensitive early-warning systems rather than uniform regional thresholds.