Figure of the week: Africa visa openness

On November 11, the African Development Bank Group released its fourth annual Visa Openness Index Report. The index measures how open African countries are with regards to their visa requirements for citizens of other African countries, and aims to show which countries are facilitating the movement of people between countries, including by allowing other Africans to travel to their country without a visa or with a visa on arrival. The report states that the open movement of people can help bolster interconnectivity, investment, and integration among countries, including through mechanisms such as increased tourism and trade.

Figure 1 shows that African countries have become increasingly, though incrementally, open to visitors from across the continent over the past four years. In 2019, on average, Africans did not need a visa to travel to 25 percent of other African countries, up from 20 percent in 2016. Conversely, in 2019, Africans needed visas to travel to 49 percent of other countries on average, down from 55 percent in 2016. In other words, Africans have “liberal access”—defined as either no visa requirements or availability of a visa on arrival—to 51 percent of the continent.

Figure 1: Change in Visa Openness scores, 2016-2019

^{Source: Africa Visa Openness Index Report, 2019.}

These numbers reflect progress made by a range of African countries and regions, as shown in Figure 2. Of the top 20 most visa-open countries, nine are in East Africa, and seven are in West Africa. North and Central Africa, conversely, lag behind, with one and, actually, no countries in the top 20, respectively. However, several countries from these regions, including Tunisia, Egypt, Gabon, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Angola, rank among the countries whose visa openness scores improved the most between 2016 and 2019.

Figure 2: Top 20 most visa-open countries by region, 2019

^{Source: Africa Visa Openness Index Report, 2019.}

The report states that, moving forward, continued improvements in visa openness will be important to capitalize on the gains of the recently launched African Continental Free Trade Area, Single African Air Transport Market, and Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons. For more on the importance of openness between African countries, see The effects of Nigeria’s closed borders on informal trade with Benin by Stephen Golub, Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, and Christina Golubski.