Somewhere in the last few years, a new kind of travel requirement showed up across Africa, and nobody sat down to keep a list of it.
It is not a visa. Governments are usually careful to say so. It gets called an authorization, or a travel permit, or a pre-registration, or an electronic travel authority. It is often cheaper and faster than a visa. Sometimes it really is a genuine piece of modernization.
But it shares one thing with a visa. You have to sort it out before you fly.
Seychelles asks every arriving traveler for one. Cabo Verde has done the same since 2019. Mozambique brought one in, watched it collapse within days, then rebuilt it from scratch. Kenya built one, then tore most of it back down for African travelers. Morocco ran one for the length of a football tournament and let it lapse afterward. South Africa launched one in October 2025 and is now trying to attach a fee to it.
Five countries. Five different systems, each behaving nothing like the others.
Nobody had put what any of them actually require in one place. So we built a tracker.
It lives at https://riascolony.org/eta-tracker, it currently covers a dozen countries, and roughly half of what we would like to know about them is still missing. This piece explains what is in the tracker, how we check it, and where the holes are.
Why we needed a list in the first place
This series started with a look at South Africa's proposed processing fee. Almost immediately we ran into a problem that had nothing to do with South Africa.
Every time we tried to line one country's system up against another, the comparison fell apart.
An article would say a country had "introduced an ETA," and that single sentence would turn out to mean something different every time. In one country it covered everybody. In another, only people who needed a visa to begin with. In a third, it covered a named list of countries, most of them nowhere near Africa. In a fourth, it had already been switched off.
The word "ETA" was doing almost no work. It told you nothing about who had to apply, what it cost, or whether you could still be turned away with one in hand.
Meanwhile, the plain questions a traveler actually has weren't gathered anywhere. Do I need this thing? What does it cost? How far ahead do I need to apply? Can I sort it at the airport instead? Is the online form even open to someone with my passport?
Those answers exist. They are just scattered across government portals in half a dozen languages, on pages that change without any notice to the person reading them. The tracker is our attempt to pull them into one place and keep that place current.
What the tracker actually records
For each country we log eight things. Each one made the list because our reporting showed it changes the answer a traveler gets.
Who it applies to. Everybody, or only people who would otherwise need a visa, or a named group of nationalities. South Africa's Electronic Travel Authorization launched in October 2025 and, according to the Department of Home Affairs, applies to travelers from visa-required countries, while it stays optional for citizens of the 22 African countries that are exempt from South Africa's visa requirement. Seychelles' Travel Authorization, by contrast, applies to literally everyone arriving in the country, visa-exempt or not. Those are opposite designs sharing the same acronym.
Compulsory or optional, and for whom. This single field causes more confusion than any other, mostly because journalists (including us, on occasion) shorten "compulsory for some, optional for others" down to just "introduced."
The fee. The African Development Bank, which co-produces the annual Africa Visa Openness Index, has argued directly that when a country already grants visa-free or visa-on-arrival access and then layers an ETA on top, that ETA should be free or close to it, and should only ask for basic passport information. Several of the systems we track charge considerably more than that.
Whether you can sort it on arrival instead. Seychelles allows this, though turning up without a Travel Authorization means paying more once you land, since the standard fee rises when it isn't handled in advance. Most of the other systems we cover give you no such option; miss the online step and you risk being denied boarding entirely.
Minimum lead time. Mozambique's current system recommends applying at least 48 hours before departure. Tanzania's referral visa category, which functions similarly for the specific nationalities it covers, has its own immigration department advising applicants to apply at least two months ahead. Those are not remotely comparable asks, and a headline that just says "pre-travel approval required" hides that gap completely.
Whether it can be refused. This is the line between a genuine permission and a fee with a form stapled to it. For most of the systems in our tracker, we still do not have a public refusal rate or clear grounds for rejection.
Whether airlines check it before boarding. During Morocco's temporary authorization scheme for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations, Royal Air Maroc stated plainly that passengers without the approval would not be allowed to board. That single fact turns what looks like an entry requirement into something enforced well before anyone reaches Moroccan soil.
Which nationalities cannot apply online at all. Several portals route specific nationalities to an embassy or consulate rather than letting them complete the process digitally. We have not been able to independently confirm a full list of which nationalities face this in each country, and rather than repeat a secondhand claim, we are treating this as an open question until we can verify it against a government source directly.
Each entry also records who runs the platform, how the Africa Visa Openness Index treats the requirement, our source, and the date we last checked it.
What surprised us while building it
Seychelles was not first. Nearly everything written about African ETAs calls Seychelles the pioneer, the first country on the continent to require one of all arriving travelers. Cabo Verde's EASE platform, which pairs mandatory pre-registration with an airport security tax, has been running since 1 January 2019. Seychelles' Travel Authorization dates to 2022, based on the government's own service description. That puts Cabo Verde roughly three years ahead. We had repeated the "Seychelles first" claim ourselves in an earlier piece, and we are correcting it here.
Ghana turned out to be genuinely free, not a mystery. When we started building the tracker, Ghana's entry sat in the unresolved column, because early coverage of its policy seemed to contradict itself. Since then we have confirmed the details directly: Ghana's e-Visa portal, launched on 25 May 2026, charges no fee for the Electronic Travel Authorization issued to African Union nationals who are not already covered by ECOWAS or Alliance of Sahel States free movement, according to Ghana's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and immigration reforms tracked by the law firm Fragomen. ECOWAS and AES citizens need no ETA at all and enter on their passport alone. Ghana is, as far as we can tell from the systems we track, the clearest example of an ETA that does exactly what the African Development Bank recommends: it screens, but it does not charge.
Recording an absence turned out to be as useful as recording a requirement, though the story got more complicated than we expected. Rwanda and Gambia are both routinely cited as models of African openness, and we wanted to check whether either had quietly added an online step behind that reputation. Rwanda has not. Its March 2020 visa regime, confirmed on Rwanda's own migration portal, waives visa fees entirely for citizens of African Union, Commonwealth, and La Francophonie member states for a 30-day stay, with no prior online application required; citizens of East African Community states get a free six-month pass on the same basis. President Paul Kagame restated the policy publicly in 2023, telling an audience at a Kigali tourism summit that any African could board a plane to Rwanda without paying anything to enter.
Gambia is where the tracker earned its keep. Coverage aimed at travelers routinely describes Gambia as visa-free for all Africans since 2019. Dig into Gambia's own visa policy, though, and the picture is narrower: guaranteed visa-free entry applies clearly to the fifteen ECOWAS states, plus a further list of countries covered by bilateral arrangements, rather than a blanket rule written into law for all 54 African Union members. Both descriptions circulate. We have flagged Gambia's entry as partially confirmed rather than fully verified, which is precisely the kind of gap a one-off article would have smoothed over without anyone noticing.
How we check what goes into it
The rules here are simple, and we would rather state them plainly than make a reader guess.
A source and a date on every claim. Each tracker entry links to where the information came from and shows when we last confirmed it.
Government sources first. Where something comes from a report, an index, or press coverage rather than a government's own material, we mark the entry as partial rather than verified. A meaningful share of the tracker is currently partial. We think that is more honest than pretending otherwise.
No filling in gaps. If we do not know a fee or a refusal rate, the field says we do not know it. We do not estimate. There are currently a few dozen open questions on the tracker page, and they are listed there rather than hidden.
Re-check intervals. Every entry carries a schedule for review. South Africa's is checked every two weeks right now, because its ETA fee regulation is a live, moving process, with the Department of Home Affairs' draft regulations published in Government Gazette No. 55072 on 27 July 2026 and public comment closing on 11 August 2026. Rwanda's entry is checked twice a year, since a country asking for nothing is unlikely to start asking for something overnight. Entries past their review date are flagged on the page.
Corrections made in public. We got the "Seychelles first" claim wrong and are correcting it in this article. We are also correcting our earlier framing of Ghana's ETA as unresolved, now that direct confirmation is available. Both corrections are on the record, and we expect more will follow as the tracker keeps running.
A tracker that quietly edits itself without telling anyone is not something a traveler can rely on. If a figure changes, we want that change to be visible, along with when it happened.
What we still do not know
In order of how much each one matters to a traveler.
Whether these authorizations can actually be refused, and how often. We have asked Seychelles' government directly, including through a formal access-to-information request, for the number of Travel Authorization applications refused since the system launched and the grounds used. We have not received a response. If an authorization is never refused in practice, it functions as a payment and a form rather than genuine permission, and that changes how several countries' openness scores should be read.
How many nationalities are steered away from online applications and why. Multiple ETA and eVisa portals across the countries we track carry country-specific exceptions that direct certain nationalities to an embassy instead of the website. We are not yet able to confirm the specifics for every system in our tracker, and we would rather leave this marked open than repeat an unverified list.
Whether temporary schemes like Morocco's become permanent. Morocco's Electronic Travel Authorization for citizens of eight otherwise visa-exempt African countries, introduced for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations, ran from 25 September 2025 to 25 January 2026 and was explicitly described by Moroccan authorities as tied to the tournament. It has now lapsed. Whether a similar mechanism returns for the next major event Morocco hosts is, for now, unknown, and we are tracking it as a question rather than a prediction.
Whether South Africa's R500 fee takes effect, and on what schedule. As of publication, the Department of Home Affairs' proposed R500 processing fee for the ETA has cleared its public comment window. The department has said the fee would apply to travelers from visa-required, non-exempt countries, on top of existing visa fees, while remaining optional (and chargeable at the same rate) for travelers from visa-exempt countries who choose to use the platform anyway. Whether the regulation is finalized as drafted, delayed, or adjusted after the comment period is something we will only know once the department publishes its next notice, and our South Africa entry stays on a two-week review cycle until it does.
How to use it, and how to help fix it
If you are travelling, the tracker at https://riascolony.org/eta-tracker tells you whether something needs doing before you fly, and roughly how far ahead to start.
Two things worth repeating clearly.
It is not complete. A dozen countries is not fifty-four. If your destination is not listed, we simply have not verified it yet, which is not the same as there being nothing to check.
Check the government's own site before you travel, every time. We link the original source on every tracker entry for exactly this reason. Our page is a snapshot of what we found on a given date, not a substitute for the portal that actually issues the document. Systems like Mozambique's have been switched on, switched off, and rebuilt within a single year. No article, ours included, should be the last thing anyone checks before booking a flight.
And if something on the tracker is wrong, tell us. Someone who applied for an authorization last week knows more about how that specific system behaves right now than any monitoring page can. There is a correction link on every entry.
Why we are maintaining this rather than writing one article and moving on
Most of what gets published about African ETAs is a single snapshot. A country announces something, it gets covered once, and the story goes cold.
But these systems keep moving. Kenya introduced a fee, then waived it for dozens of African nationalities, then dropped the requirement for almost the entire continent. Mozambique suspended its system after ten days and needed nine months to bring back a version that worked. Ghana went from promising visa-free entry for all Africans in January 2025 to actually requiring a free digital authorisation for most non-ECOWAS Africans by May 2026, a reminder that "visa-free" and "no formality at all" are not always the same announcement. South Africa's fee is still a proposal working its way through a gazette, not a settled fact.
A single article about any one of those moments goes stale within months. A maintained record behaves differently. It notices when something changes. When South Africa's fee regulation is finalised, when the next Africa Visa Openness Index lands and we can check whether Ghana's and Kenya's scores moved the way their policy changes suggest they should, we will know, because the relevant tracker entry will already be flagged for review.
Those moments are also, almost always, stories in their own right. The tracker is not separate from the reporting. It is what tells us where to look next.
One prediction we are putting on the record
The Africa Visa Openness Index's own 2025 report already flags exactly this dynamic, describing electronic travel authorisations, when layered onto existing visa-free or visa-on-arrival access, as a genuine risk to the openness those policies were built to create. South Africa's ETA sits inside that debate directly.
Right now, South Africa's ETA is optional for the 22 African countries whose citizens are exempt from its visa requirement. Officials have described that exemption using language that leaves room for it to change later.
If that optional status holds, South Africa's score in the next Africa Visa Openness Index should move only slightly, even with the cost of a standard South African visa application effectively dropping once the R500 processing fee replaces the older, pricier outsourced model described by the Department of Home Affairs.
If the ETA becomes compulsory for those same 22 countries, the score should fall, for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone actually being turned away at the border. A compulsory pre-travel step counts against openness under the Index's methodology regardless of how often it is approved.
The next edition of the Index typically follows the annual pattern set by the African Development Bank and African Union Commission. We will check the outcome against our own prediction and publish the result, whichever way it lands.
That is the whole point of keeping the tracker running rather than filing this once and walking away.
The African ETA Tracker is at https://riascolony.org/eta-tracker. Part of MOVING AFRICA, a series on the cost and difficulty of travelling across the continent.