There is a question almost every African traveler has asked at some point, and there is no published index that answers it properly.
How far does my passport actually take me inside Africa?
Not how far it takes you in the world. That question already has good answers. The Henley Passport Index ranks every passport in the world by how many destinations its holders can enter without getting a visa first, and newspapers quote it every time it updates.
But that is a global measure. For most African travelers, it answers the wrong question.
A Nigerian planning a trip to Kigali does not care how many European countries her passport opens up. She cares whether she can get into Rwanda, what it will cost her, how far in advance she needs to apply, and whether she can do the whole thing from her phone.
Nobody has built a ranking for that. We went looking for one, and what we found instead says a lot about why it does not exist.
The two indexes we do have are both looking the wrong way
There are two major measures that matter here, and both of them look at travel from the destination's side, not the traveler's.
The Africa Visa Openness Index (AVOI), put together by the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission, measures how open each African country is to citizens of the other 53. It ranks destinations, not passports.
So the AVOI can tell you that Rwanda and The Gambia are joint first in Africa for visa openness, both letting in every African nationality with no visa at all. It can tell you which African countries are the easiest to get into. What it cannot tell you is how easy it is to travel on any one specific passport, because that is not what it measures.
The Henley Passport Index does rank passports, but against all 227 destinations in the world, not just the 53 other countries in Africa. As of the July 2026 edition, Nigeria sits 90th out of 199 ranked passports, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 44 destinations worldwide. South Africa, the strongest passport on the continent, ranks 49th globally with access to 101 destinations. Rwanda and Tanzania are tied at 69th with 68 destinations each, and Kenya is East Africa's strongest passport at 68th, with 70 destinations.
Those numbers count Europe, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas along with Africa. They do not isolate how much of the African continent each passport actually opens.
Put the two indexes side by side and you get an odd gap. You can find out how open Rwanda is to visitors. You can find out how far a Rwandan passport goes in the world. What you cannot easily find out is how far a Rwandan passport goes inside Africa.
That specific thing, passport by destination, limited to the continent, is exactly what nobody has published.
Why building this is harder than it sounds
The obvious response is that someone should just build it. Take 54 passports, 54 destinations, count who lets who in without a visa, and publish the ranking.
We started down that road ourselves. We stopped, because the counting is where the whole idea falls apart.
What actually counts as access? Rwanda gives every African citizen a visa on arrival, free of charge. Most people would call that access. Tanzania gives many African citizens visa-free entry, but places Nigerians in what it calls a Referral Visa category. Under Tanzania's own guidance, applicants in this category need approval from the Commissioner General of Immigration or, for Zanzibar specifically, the Commissioner of Immigration there, and are advised to apply at least two months before they travel. They are also told not to book flights or make any reservations until that approval comes through.
Technically, that is a visa, so a simple count would mark it as closed. But a Nigerian who plans three months ahead and applies through the online portal will get in. A Nigerian who decides on Monday that they want to fly to Dar es Salaam on Friday will not. A yes-or-no count treats those two travelers identically, and they are not in the same position at all.
Where does an ETA even sit? Seychelles requires every visitor, of every nationality, to get an Electronic Travel Authorization before they leave home. According to the Seychelles Immigration Service, there is no exemption; even citizens of countries with formal visa waivers still need the ETA, and the immigration service reserves the right to refuse entry even after it is granted. It is not called a visa. It has to be obtained in advance regardless. So is Seychelles "open" or "closed" to a country it has a reciprocal waiver with? Depends entirely on which box you use to count it, and the two big indexes do not agree with each other on this.
And then there is a whole layer that nobody counts at all. Mozambique's new electronic visa and ETA portal, which the government launched in February 2026 to run alongside VFS Global, excludes six nationalities from applying online: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Nepal and Somalia. Everyone else on that list of excluded countries can apply from their phone. Nigerians and Ethiopians have to go to a physical Mozambican embassy or consulate and do it the old way.
The visa requirement for a Nigerian visiting Mozambique and a Brazilian visiting Mozambique might be the same on paper. The route to actually getting that visa is completely different. One person fills out a form at home in twenty minutes. The other has to travel to Abuja, find the embassy, and apply in person.
No visa-free access count captures any of that, because on paper, nothing about the visa requirement changed. The requirement is identical. The experience of meeting it is not.
So a ranking built the ordinary way, counting visa-free versus visa-required, would say Mozambique treats Nigerians and Brazilians the same. It would say Tanzania is closed to Nigerians in exactly the same way it is closed to a country it has no relationship with at all. Neither of those statements is true, but a simple count cannot tell the difference.
What the numbers we do have actually tell us
There are things we can say with real confidence, using figures that are published, dated and checkable. We would rather stick to those than publish a ranking we cannot stand behind.
Nigeria's position in the world has been sliding. Nigeria dropped one place to 90th on the July 2026 Henley Passport Index, with its visa-free score unchanged at 44 destinations, having briefly climbed to 89th in the April 2026 edition. According to reporting that reviewed three successive Henley editions, Nigeria's actual number of accessible destinations fell from 46 in January 2025 to 44 by mid-2026, even while its overall rank crept up, largely because other countries fell faster. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Somalia, Mauritania and São Tomé and Príncipe are among the countries that moved Nigeria into their "visa required" category over the past few years.
On the openness side, the same period saw a genuine tightening. The AVOI's 2025 report notes that Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Nigeria and Somalia all switched from broad visa-on-arrival policies to requiring a visa arranged ahead of travel, a step the report itself calls a step backwards for openness. Two of those four countries, Guinea-Bissau and Somalia, have since opened e-Visa portals, which soften the practical burden even though the requirement itself still counts as closed under AVOI's methodology.
So in the same stretch of time, Nigeria became harder to enter for at least some travelers, and getting into other African countries did not get any easier for Nigerians either. Both directions moved the same way.
The countries most open to Africans are not the richest ones. The 2025 AVOI found that nine of its top twenty performing countries are low-income economies, four of them landlocked, with another ten in the lower-middle-income bracket. Rwanda and The Gambia share the top spot, both offering visa-free entry to every African nationality. Benin and Seychelles have also featured at or near the top in recent years, though Seychelles saw its ranking drop sharply in the 2025 edition after the AVOI reclassified its mandatory ETA as functionally equivalent to an e-Visa, a category the index treats as a visa requirement rather than genuine openness. Kenya has also improved after waiving its ETA requirement for African travelers.
The overall direction on the continent is still toward more openness, but slowly, and unevenly. The AVOI's 2025 edition recorded visa-free travel reaching a record 28.2 percent of all possible intra-African travel scenarios, up from 20 percent when the index began tracking this in 2016. Thirty-one African countries, 57 percent of the continent, now offer some form of e-Visa to Africans, up from just nine countries in 2016. That is real progress. But it is progress sitting alongside four countries moving in the opposite direction in a single year, and a visa still being required in nearly half of all travel scenarios on the continent.
What we cannot do, based on anything published, is turn all of that into a clean sentence like "the Nigerian passport gives visa-free access to X African countries and the Ghanaian passport gives access to Y." We could produce a number like that. We do not think we could defend it against the first person who checked it against their own travel experience.
What a real Africa passport index would have to measure
If somebody is eventually going to build this properly, and we think somebody should, the fields it would need are reasonably clear by now. Reporting on this topic has surfaced them one at a time.
Entry status. Visa-free, visa on arrival, authorization required before travel, full visa required. This is the traditional measure and still the necessary starting point.
Channel. Can this specific nationality apply online at all, or are they routed to an embassy regardless of what the general visa policy says? Mozambique's six excluded nationalities show exactly why this matters, and it is invisible in every index we looked at.
Lead time. Tanzania's guidance tells Referral Visa applicants to apply at least two months ahead. Seychelles opens its ETA application window 30 days before arrival but processes standard applications within 24 hours if you wait until the last minute. Mozambique's ETA needs at least 48 hours' notice for the 29 nationalities covered by it. A requirement you can satisfy the night before a flight and one that needs two months of planning are not the same requirement, even if both get filed under "visa" in a spreadsheet.
Cost. Not just the headline visa fee, but everything mandatory on top of it: processing fees, service provider charges, security levies. South Africa's own proposed reform makes this point well. The Department of Home Affairs has proposed replacing its outsourced visa service model with a state-run Electronic Travel Authorization charging a flat R500 processing fee. For travelers from visa-required countries who currently pay a compulsory outsourced service fee, the total cost would fall from roughly R1,975 to R925, according to the department, a saving described as around 53 percent. That is not a change in who needs a visa. It is a change in what getting one actually costs, and it shows how much a fee structure can hide inside an unchanged visa requirement. The proposal was open for public comment until 11 August 2026 and is not yet in force.
Refusability. Can an authorization actually be turned down, and how often does that happen? Seychelles states plainly that its immigration service reserves the right to refuse entry even to holders of an approved ETA. That is the difference between a genuine permission and what amounts to a fee attached to a form. We have not yet found published refusal-rate data for any of these schemes, from Seychelles or anywhere else.
Documentation. A confirmed flight booking, proof of accommodation, sometimes a local host's identification details. Several ETA and e-Visa systems, Seychelles and Mozambique among them, ask for return tickets and proof of accommodation as standard. A traveler who has not booked anything yet cannot complete an application that demands a confirmed itinerary, which quietly rules out the kind of loosely planned trip a lot of people take for granted.
Six fields, and only the first one shows up in the indexes that currently exist.
Why nobody has built it yet
The reason is not some great mystery. It is labor.
Entry status gets published centrally, once a year, by the AVOI. None of the other five fields are collected centrally anywhere. They sit scattered across more than 50 government immigration portals, in several languages, on pages that change without notice and without any archive of what they used to say.
To build the full picture, someone would need to confirm six separate facts for each of 54 passports against each of 54 destinations, then keep all of it current as policies shift, sometimes overnight. That is not really a research project you finish once. It is closer to something an institution would need to maintain permanently.
We are not pretending we can do that alone.
What we have done instead is start with the piece that matters most right now, and be honest about how incomplete it still is.
Where we have actually got to
We now maintain a running tracker of pre-travel authorization schemes across Africa: which countries require permission before you fly, what it costs, how far ahead you need to apply, and which nationalities are excluded from the easy route.
It currently covers 12 countries. Roughly half the fields we are tracking are solidly confirmed. Everything we have not been able to verify is marked as a gap rather than filled in with a guess, and every entry we do have carries a source and a date attached to it.
That is a long way short of a full passport ranking. But it covers the part of the picture that the existing indexes see least clearly, and it happens to be the part that has been changing the fastest.
Three things stand out from building it so far.
An ETA is not one single kind of thing. Seychelles requires one from every nationality and charges a fee that scales with how fast you want it processed. Kenya built one, then waived it specifically for African travellers. Mozambique's version applies to 29 nationalities, only three of which are African. South Africa's proposed version effectively replaces a visa fee rather than adding a new layer on top of visa-free entry. These are five different tools wearing the same name.
Some countries really are as clean as their reputation suggests. Rwanda and The Gambia ask nothing at all of African travelers before they fly, no ETA, no pre-registration, nothing. We checked specifically because both countries are held up so often as the model to follow, and on the evidence we found, the reputation holds up.
The exclusions are the part almost nobody is looking at. Of everything we came across while building this tracker, the list of six nationalities barred from Mozambique's online portal, and Nigeria's placement inside Tanzania's referral category, were by far the hardest details to actually find, and the least visible in any of the published indexes.
What it would take to go further
We plan to keep adding to the tracker. But a genuine passport ranking for Africa would need three things we do not currently have access to.
Fee schedules broken down by nationality. A lot of African visa fees vary depending on the applicant's passport, often on a reciprocal basis. Where these are published at all, they tend to sit on individual embassy websites, one country at a time, with no central list anywhere.
Refusal data. Governments hold this information. Almost none of them publish it. Without it, there is no way to say how much of an "authorization" is a genuine gate and how much is simply a fee with paperwork attached.
Someone in each country, actually trying the process. The only fully reliable way to know what an application really requires is to have a person attempt it and report back honestly. That is not something a single newsroom can realistically do across 54 countries at once.
If you work on this kind of data, hold information relevant to it, or have recently applied for entry somewhere on the continent and found the real process did not match the official page, we would like to hear about it.
The question this is really about
There is a reason this gap matters beyond knowing what to expect at check-in.
African integration policy assumes people can move. The African Continental Free Trade Area assumes traders can travel to sell and source goods. The African Union's free movement protocol assumes citizens can cross borders with reasonable ease. Tourism strategies across the continent assume a steady flow of regional visitors.
All of that gets discussed, almost entirely, using measures of how open destination countries are.
Almost none of it gets discussed using a measure of what an African passport can actually do, in practice, on the continent it belongs to.
Those are two different questions. The second one is the one an actual traveler has to live with, at the airport, filling out a form, waiting on an approval email, or being told to come back with a booking reference they do not have yet.
Until somebody builds a measure that answers the second question properly, African mobility will keep being judged mostly from the destination's point of view, and the parts of the system that quietly treat one nationality differently from another, without ever changing the written visa requirement, will keep going unrecorded.
We have made a small start on that. It is a small one, and we think it is worth saying so plainly.
Part of MOVING AFRICA, a series on the cost and difficulty of travelling across the continent.
Sources referenced
- Henley Passport Index, July 2026 edition, Henley & Partners (henleyglobal.com)
- Africa Visa Openness Index (AVOI) 2025, African Development Bank / African Union Commission (visaopenness.org)
- Tanzania Immigration Department, Referral Visa guidance (immigration.go.tz)
- Mozambique National Immigration Service, eVisa/ETA portal exclusions (evisa.gov.mz)
- Seychelles Immigration Service, Electronic Travel Authorisation requirements (ics.gov.sc)
- South Africa Department of Home Affairs, proposed ETA fee regulations, July 2026