The concluding article in MOVING AFRICA
This series started with a story about a fee.
South Africa had proposed a R500 charge for its new electronic travel authorization. Coverage across the continent framed it as a new cost being pushed onto African travelers, with a list of affected neighbors attached to the story.
When we read the actual gazette, almost none of that held up. For the Africans who would actually pay the fee, it was a cut of more than half compared to the visa costs they faced before. The neighboring countries named in the coverage were the ones the fee did not apply to.
That was six articles ago. What we have learned since is that the confusion around that one fee was not a one-off mistake. It was a symptom of something bigger.
Borders across Africa are changing in ways that old language cannot describe properly, and in ways that the tools we use to measure openness cannot see. This piece lays out what we found over six months of reporting, and what it means for the idea that Africa could become one connected travel market.
Permission has moved from the border to before the border
The clearest pattern across the continent right now is not that countries are shutting their doors. It is that they are moving the moment when permission gets granted.
Nigeria stopped issuing visas on arrival on 1 May 2025. Travelers who used to get their stamp at the airport now have to apply online and wait for approval before they even board a plane. The Nigeria Immigration Service says the switch, part of the country's Nigeria Visa Policy 2025, was about tighter security screening and a faster process overall, and on paper the new e-visa system does turn applications around in 24 to 48 hours rather than making people queue at the airport.
Nigeria is not alone. Seychelles now requires every arriving traveler, no matter their nationality, to hold an approved Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) before they can even check in for their flight, a system that has since been expanded to cover people arriving by sea as well. Cabo Verde has required pre-registration through its EASE portal since 2019, and from 1 January 2026 it went further, ending visa-on-arrival altogether for citizens of 96 countries, who must now apply at an embassy before they travel. Mozambique rolled out an ETA requirement covering 29 countries. Morocco briefly required visa-free travelers to get authorization ahead of a football tournament. South Africa's own ETA platform went live in October 2025.
Across the whole continent, the shift shows up clearly in the numbers. The Africa Visa Openness Index, jointly produced by the African Development Bank and the African Union, found that visa-on-arrival access dropped to just 20.4 percent of intra-African travel scenarios in 2025, the lowest level the index has ever recorded, down from 24.8 percent the year before. Back in 2020, visa-on-arrival access made up 28 percent of scenarios. Meanwhile, the number of country-to-country travel pairs where a visa or visa-equivalent is required ahead of travel jumped from 1,348 in 2024 to 1,463 in 2025, pushing the visa-required share of all scenarios above 51 percent for the first time since 2021.
Some of that shift is genuine restriction. Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Nigeria and Somalia all moved away from broad visa-on-arrival policies during this period. Some of it is digitization dressed up as the same thing. A country that replaces a slow consular queue with a same-day online approval has not necessarily made entry harder for anyone.
The trouble is that in the statistics, the two changes look identical.
The measurements cannot tell the difference
This is where our reporting spent most of its time, because the problem turned out to run deeper than we expected going in.
The Africa Visa Openness Index is the instrument that continental integration policy runs on. When African governments debate free movement, its numbers are the evidence they reach for. Its methodology treats any compulsory pre-travel authorization as a visa required ahead of travel, no matter how cheap or fast it is to get. That is a defensible choice on its own terms. A requirement is a requirement, whether it takes five minutes online or five weeks at a consulate.
But the results this produces are hard to make sense of.
Seychelles went from sharing joint first place in 2024, alongside Benin, The Gambia and Rwanda, to landing dead last, 54th out of 54, with a score of exactly zero in the 2025 edition. It did not refuse entry to a single African traveler in that time. It added a form. The index's own 2025 report is explicit that Seychelles' ETA is classified as an e-visa because it is required before travel and shares similar features with other countries' e-visa systems, and that this classification alone determines the country's rank this year.
Kenya tells a similar story in reverse. When Kenya's ETA requirement was in force, it fell 17 places to rank 46th in the 2024 edition of the index. Once Kenya waived that ETA requirement for most of the continent, including all East African Community partners, it jumped to become the third most visa-open country in Africa in the 2025 edition. Same country. Same borders. A swing of more than 40 places depending on one administrative decision.
Then there is Mozambique, whose national migration service, known as SENAMI, launched an ETA portal requiring 29 countries' citizens to apply in advance, only to suspend it soon after because of technical problems with the registration system, according to the 2025 Africa Visa Openness Report. The index records that suspension as having had no real effect on Mozambique's score, since the requirement barely had time to take hold. A functioning digital border would have cost the country points. A broken one cost nothing.
There is also a strange split at the very top. The Henley Openness Index, built using data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), places Seychelles second in the world for openness in its 2025 edition, with visa-free access to 197 out of 198 possible countries. That is the same country the Africa Visa Openness Index ranks dead last on the continent, using data that also traces back to IATA. Two of the most widely cited measures of the same country's openness, drawing on the same underlying source, land at opposite ends of their respective scales.
None of this necessarily means either index is wrong on its own terms. It means both instruments were built to answer a simpler question, does this passport need a visa, that no longer captures what is actually happening at African borders today.
Access is now tiered by nationality, and nothing records it
This is the finding that surprised us most, and it may end up being the most important one.
Mozambique's electronic visa portal lists a small number of nationalities, including Ethiopia, Somalia and Nigeria among African countries, that cannot apply online at all and must go through an embassy instead. Tanzania grants visa-free entry to most Commonwealth citizens, but Nigeria sits outside that exemption and instead falls under a referral visa category that requires sign-off from the Commissioner General of Immigration, along with a local host and an invitation letter. A Kenyan, Zambian or Malawian citizen simply walks through the same border.
In neither case has the underlying visa requirement itself changed on paper. What has changed is the route a traveler has to take to satisfy it. That distinction does not show up in any openness index currently in use. A measure that only tracks whether a visa is required will record Mozambique as treating Nigerian and, say, Brazilian applicants identically, because on paper it does. One applies from a laptop in an afternoon. The other has to travel to a Nigerian city with a Mozambican mission and wait.
This kind of tiering by nationality costs a government nothing to put in place. It requires no new law, no announcement, no gazette notice that a journalist or a researcher can find and cite. It is, in effect, a setting on a database that shapes who gets to move easily and who does not, invisible to anyone who is not directly affected by it.
The announcement and the receipt are different documents
The ECOWAS aviation reform gave us the cleanest test case in this whole series, because unlike a visa policy, the outcome should show up directly on the price of a ticket.
At their December 2024 summit in Abuja, ECOWAS heads of state adopted a Supplementary Act requiring all member states to remove taxes applied to air transport and cut passenger and security charges by 25 percent, effective 1 January 2026. The bloc's own communications describe the goal as tackling some of the highest air travel costs in the world, with taxes, charges and fees reportedly making up as much as 50 to 65 percent of a typical ticket price in the region. ECOWAS has said the reform is meant to support tourism, trade and free movement across its 15 member states.
Reporting from mid-2026 suggests the picture on the ground is mixed. Coverage from Ghana's GBC in June 2026 noted that while Côte d'Ivoire had fully applied the 25 percent cut through a national decree, Ghana and Nigeria were still working through domestic regulatory processes to bring their own charges in line. A separate July 2026 report on the reform's implementation quoted an ECOWAS aviation official acknowledging that full compliance would take time, since changes to national tax law require legislative approval, even though all 12 relevant member states had reportedly begun the process. In short, the rule took effect on paper in January 2026, but turning that rule into a lower number on an actual airline receipt has taken longer and looked different from one country to the next.
That gap between an agreement signed in a conference room and a rule enforced at a check-in counter is, in miniature, the entire story of this series.
So can Africa be one travel market?
Here is the honest answer after six articles of reporting.
Not on the current path, and not mainly because of visas.
The continent has not settled on what an open border actually is. Until it does, governments will keep announcing openness while the indices that are supposed to measure that openness record restriction, and both sides will be able to point to real numbers to back themselves up. Seychelles is, depending on which respected, IATA-sourced index you pick up, either the second most open country on earth or the least open country in Africa. That is not a rounding error. It is an unresolved argument about definitions sitting underneath a continent-wide policy agenda.
The tools cannot see the newest kind of restriction. Nationality-based channel restrictions, of the kind Mozambique and Tanzania apply, cost nothing to set up, need no legislation, get no press release, and appear in no published index. As more of Africa's border processing moves onto digital platforms, this becomes the cheapest way to restrict access to a country, and by far the hardest to detect from the outside.
Regional agreements do not reliably reach the ordinary traveler. The African Union's Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons was adopted in January 2018 and needs 15 ratifications to take legal force. As of 2026, only four countries, Rwanda, Mali, Niger and São Tomé and Príncipe, have ratified it, still 11 short, with no new ratification added in years, according to tracking by the Free Move Hub and reporting cited by the ECOWAS Parliament in 2025. The ECOWAS aviation reform entered force on paper in January 2026 while national compliance was still being worked out mid-year. South Africa's ETA fee is, as of this writing, still a draft regulation open for public comment, not a law. In each case, something real was agreed at a summit. In each case, the distance between that agreement and the person standing at the counter is exactly where the policy currently lives.
What would have to be true
We would rather end on something testable than something inspiring.
For Africa to function as one connected travel market, a few concrete things would have to become true, and each one is measurable.
A traveler would be able to find out, in one place, what is required of them. Right now they largely cannot, which is one reason this series ended up building a tracker of its own rather than simply reporting on other people's numbers.
The measurement itself would need to separate restriction from modernization. An index that scores a fast, cheap, digital authorization exactly the same as a slow, expensive consular visa cannot really guide policy. It gives a government no credit for making entry easier, and no penalty for leaving a genuinely slow system untouched.
Differences in access based on nationality would need to be visible somewhere. If a country sends citizens of three African nations to an embassy while everyone else applies from their phone, that fact should be recorded and trackable. Right now it mostly is not, unless a journalist happens to read the fine print on a government portal.
Regional decisions would need to reach the receipt, not just the communiqué. Not the press statement from a summit. The actual price printed on the ticket, and the actual queue at the actual border.
Where South Africa's fee stands now
At the time of writing, South Africa's Department of Home Affairs has published draft regulations proposing the R500 ETA processing fee, gazetted by Minister Leon Schreiber on 27 July 2026. Public comment on the draft closed on 11 August 2026. If the department goes ahead with the fee as proposed, the regulations would take effect on 17 August 2026. The department has said the ETA will become compulsory for travelers from countries that already needed a visa, while remaining optional, at least initially, for citizens of the 22 African countries that currently enjoy visa-free access to South Africa. The department has also said it expects fee-paying, visa-exempt travelers to use the platform voluntarily anyway, because of the convenience it offers.
Whether that optional status for visa-exempt African travelers holds is worth watching closely, because it is a direct test of the definitional problem this whole series has traced. If the ETA stays optional for those 22 countries, South Africa's score on next year's Africa Visa Openness Index should barely move, even though a real cost has fallen by more than half for the travelers who do pay it. If it becomes compulsory for those countries too, expect the score to fall sharply, for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone actually being turned away at the border.
Two countries doing it differently
Through all of this reporting, two countries kept coming up for the opposite reason.
Rwanda has, since March 2020, waived visa fees on arrival for citizens of every African Union member state, allowing stays of up to 30 days with no prior application needed, according to Rwanda's Directorate General of Immigration and Emigration. The Gambia grants visa-free entry to citizens of all 53 other African countries, a policy that has held since 2020 and helped it tie for first place on the Africa Visa Openness Index in both 2024 and 2025.
We checked both specifically, because reputations like these are worth testing rather than repeating. Neither country has a hidden online prerequisite. Neither charges an entry fee to African visitors. Neither singles out particular nationalities for a slower channel. It can be done, and it is currently being done, by two countries that are not wealthy and do not enjoy any unusual advantage over their neighbors.
The question the rest of the continent still has to answer is not whether an open African border can actually work in practice. Rwanda and The Gambia have already answered that one.
The real question is whether the digital systems now being built across the rest of Africa are moving toward that same kind of openness, or drifting quietly away from it while the published numbers say something else entirely.
We spent six articles trying to work out which of those two things is happening. The honest answer, based on the evidence in front of us, is that both are happening at once, in different countries and sometimes inside the same country, and the current measurement tools are not good enough to tell us clearly which trend is winning.
That is not a tidy conclusion. But it is the one the evidence actually supports, and it is more useful than the alternative, which is to keep quoting a single continental average that may, in places, be recording modernization as if it were decline.
Africa is digitizing its borders faster than it has agreed on what those borders are for.
Sources referenced in this article
- African Development Bank and African Union Commission, Africa Visa Openness Report 2025 (visaopenness.org)
- Nigeria Immigration Service / Federal Ministry of Interior, Nigeria Visa Policy 2025 guidelines
- South Africa Department of Home Affairs, draft ETA fee regulations, Government Gazette No. 55072, 27 July 2026
- ECOWAS, official statements on the Supplementary Act on Aviation Charges, Taxes and Fees (ecowas.int)
- Henley & Partners, 2025 Henley Openness Index
- Free Move Hub, tracking of African Union Protocol on Free Movement of Persons ratifications
- Rwanda Directorate General of Immigration and Emigration, visa-on-arrival policy (migration.gov.rw)
- Reporting on Cabo Verde's EASE portal changes, effective 1 January 2026
This concludes the first run of MOVING AFRICA. The African ETA Tracker will continue to be updated as requirements change and as outstanding questions to national authorities are answered.