In 2024, Seychelles was joint first on the Africa Visa Openness Index, sharing the top position with The Gambia, Rwanda and Benin. All four granted visa-free entry to citizens of every African country.
In 2025 Seychelles scores 0.000 and ranks 54th of 54. Last on the continent. Below Sudan. Below Libya.
It did not refuse entry to a single African. What changed is that the AVOI records it as the first African country to require an Electronic Travel Authorization of everyone arriving.
In the same year, the Henley Openness Index ranked Seychelles second in the world, admitting 197 of a possible 198 nationalities without a prior visa — a position it still held when we checked on 5 August 2026.
Both indices draw on data from the International Air Transport Association. Both are published by serious institutions. Both are cited in policy discussions about African mobility. And, as it turns out, both apply nearly the same test. They still reach opposite conclusions.
The definitions are closer than they look
The obvious explanation would be that the two indices define openness differently. They do not. Read side by side, their criteria are remarkably close.
The Africa Visa Openness Index, published by the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission, awards full marks where no visa is required, partial marks for a visa on arrival, and nothing where permission must be obtained before travel. It places an ETA in that final category on the basis that the information required and the point at which approval is granted are substantively similar to an e-Visa.
The Henley Openness Index counts the nationalities a country allows to enter without requiring a prior visa or pre-departure government approval. Its methodology explicitly addresses ETAs and counts them as open only where they can be obtained without pre-departure government approval. Where a government-approved authorization is required before departure, Henley scores zero. It applies the same principle even to a visa on arrival where advance clearance is required.
Put simply, both indices are asking much the same thing: do you need government approval before you travel?
There is, however, one important difference between them. The AVOI looks only at how African countries treat other African travelers, while Henley looks at access for nationalities from around the world. That difference explains some of the gaps between their rankings. It does not, however, explain all of them.
The AVOI measures how open a country is to the other 53 African countries. Henley measures how open it is to all 198 countries and territories worldwide. A country can therefore be highly open to Africans while being considerably less open to the rest of the world.
That is why The Gambia can score a perfect 1.000 and rank joint first on the AVOI while sitting 27th on Henley with access for 133 nationalities. There is no contradiction there. The two indices are measuring different populations.
That difference in scope, however, does not explain Seychelles.
A country admitting 197 of 198 nationalities without a prior visa is necessarily admitting African nationalities. There is no arithmetic in which Seychelles can be open to almost every nationality on earth while simultaneously being closed to all 53 of its African neighbors.
And Seychelles is not the only case.
Guinea-Bissau scores a perfect 198 of 198 on Henley, making it joint first in the world. Yet the AVOI records it as having moved from visa on arrival to requiring a visa ahead of travel, placing it in the lower half of the African ranking.
Two countries. Both with recent changes involving pre-travel authorization. Both maximally open according to one index and restrictive according to the other.
Meanwhile, where there is no comparable pre-travel authorization, the two indices broadly converge. Kenya and Rwanda both score 198 on Henley. Rwanda ranks joint first on the AVOI, while Kenya ranks third.
That pattern is important. The two indices are not simply producing contradictory results. Their biggest differences appear where countries have introduced a digital step between the traveler and the border.
And that brings us back to Seychelles.
The question is not simply what an open border looks like on paper. It is what happens when a country introduces a system that requires travelers to obtain an approval before departure, but still allows them to complete that process after arrival.
To understand why the indices treat that system so differently, we need to look closely at what the Seychelles eTA actually does.
The Government of Seychelles is clear that airlines should verify a valid, approved eTA at check-in before allowing a passenger to board. It describes the requirement as mandatory. But the system does not end at the airport gate.
A traveler who arrives without an approved eTA can still complete the application on arrival. They cannot proceed to immigration until the application has been approved, and they are charged a €30 penalty for arriving without one.
That creates an unusual arrangement. The eTA is required before departure, but the government also allows a traveler who has failed to obtain it in advance to apply after landing. The authorization itself remains mandatory. The traveler cannot proceed through immigration or enter the country without approval.
In other words, the €30 penalty does not remove the authorization requirement. It allows the traveler to complete it late. That distinction becomes more significant when you look at what the eTA is actually designed to achieve.
The government's consent screen says the information submitted is processed for the purpose of "determining your eligibility to travel" to, within and from the Republic of Seychelles. This is more than a simple notification that a traveler intends to arrive. The system is assessing whether that traveler is eligible to travel.
The application also does more than collect basic passenger information. Travelers are asked to provide a passport scan, a photograph, information about their trip, health and customs declarations, a permit copy where applicable, and payment. The application can be submitted only within 30 days of arrival.
Some of these requirements resemble the functions of a traditional landing card. The 30-day window, meanwhile, ties the authorization to a specific journey rather than providing a general travel clearance. The system also states that it will ensure travelers stay only in accommodation certified by the Department of Tourism and reserves the right to contact those establishments.
Taken together, this makes the Seychelles system difficult to describe as simply a digital arrival form. It combines elements of travel authorization, an arrival declaration and tourism compliance.
That is important because of how the AVOI classified the system.
The report says the eTA's information requirements and costs substantively overlap with those of other countries' e-Visa systems. It specifically describes applicants as having to provide a confirmed airline or cruise ticket showing arrival and departure dates, accommodation confirmation for each location of their stay, and a letter of invitation when visiting friends or family.
The African Development Bank has confirmed that the source is the government's own portal. The FAQ section for visitors and tourists states that travellers staying one night or more must submit a copy of their hotel or accommodation booking showing check-in and check-out dates, and that those staying with family or friends need a letter of invitation from the host, showing the host's name, address, contact number and NIN details. We had been working from the shorter summary page rather than the FAQ.
Now set that against the two rulebooks.
How the two indices classify different entry arrangements
Visa-free
Henley: Open
AVOI: Most open, 1.0
Visa on arrival, with no advance clearance
Henley: Open
AVOI: Middle category, 0.8
ETA issued automatically, with no approval required
Henley: Open
AVOI: Pre-travel requirement, 0
ETA requiring approval before departure
Henley: Not open
AVOI: Pre-travel requirement, 0
e-Visa requiring approval before departure
Henley: Not open
AVOI: Pre-travel requirement, 0
Traditional visa
Henley: Not open
AVOI: Pre-travel requirement, 0
The AVOI sees a mandatory authorization that travelers are told to obtain ahead of travel, and scores it as a visa before travel: zero. Henley sees a border a traveler can in fact reach and cross by obtaining authorization at arrival, and scores it as open.
Each index resolved the ambiguity in the direction its own methodology pointed. And that is where the problem becomes clearer.
The AVOI already has a middle category, weighted at 0.8, for visa on arrival. Seychelles allows a traveler without prior approval to complete the authorization on arrival, subject to a €30 penalty, while at the same time instructing airlines to verify an approved authorization before boarding. Whether that combination is sufficiently similar to visa on arrival to warrant the middle category is precisely the question we have put to the report's authors. The answer matters because it is the difference between Seychelles appearing at the bottom of the African ranking and sitting roughly in the middle.
Henley's methodology takes the opposite route. It scores an arrangement at zero where a traveler requires government approval before departure, including cases where a visa on arrival requires advance clearance. Seychelles instructs airlines to refuse boarding to passengers who do not have an approved authorization. Yet Henley counts Seychelles as allowing 197 of 198 nationalities to enter without a prior visa.
The point, then, is not simply that one index is right and the other is wrong.
It is that the border itself has changed.
A country can now build a digital system that combines pre-travel approval, arrival processing and other compliance checks in a way that does not fit neatly into the categories created to measure openness. Faced with that ambiguity, two carefully defined methodologies can arrive at radically different conclusions about the same system.
That is not necessarily a failure of either index. But it does expose a gap in both taxonomies. And as more countries move toward digital travel authorization, that gap is likely to become harder to ignore.
Guinea-Bissau is the case that has no easy explanation
The argument about where to draw the line can explain Seychelles. It does not explain Guinea-Bissau.
Guinea-Bissau scores a perfect 198 of 198 on Henley — joint first in the world. The AVOI records it as having switched from visa-on-arrival to requiring a visa ahead of travel, and notes that it recently launched an e-Visa portal.
Henley's methodology has no ambiguity about e-Visas. A government-approved electronic visa required before departure scores zero. There is no automatic-issuance category to fall back on.
There are a few possible explanations. Guinea-Bissau's system may not operate in the way the AVOI describes it. Henley's underlying data may not yet reflect the change. Or there may be an explanation for why the two indices classify the same system differently.
Kenya gives the closest comparison
If you wanted to isolate the effect of a single policy change on a country's measured openness, Kenya offers perhaps the clearest example on the continent.
The AVOI classified Kenya's ETA in the same way it classified Seychelles' system: as requiring permission ahead of travel. Kenya ranked 46th.
After Kenya waived the ETA requirement, it moved to third.
Same country. Same borders. Same geography, economy and security environment. What changed was the requirement for travelers to obtain that authorization before travelling.
The result was a 43-place movement in the AVOI ranking.
That tells us something important about the index. Its measure of openness is highly sensitive to whether a country requires pre-travel authorization. Whether that is a strength or a weakness depends on what we think a visa-openness index should be measuring.
Mozambique shows the measurement rewarding failure
Mozambique introduced an ETA in April 2025 requiring travelers from 29 visa-exempt countries to submit their details at least 48 hours before arrival. The requirement became mandatory on 24 April, but Mozambique's National Migration Service suspended it on 16 May after technical problems prevented travelers from submitting their information. The 2025 AVOI records the suspension as having no effect on Mozambique's score. The country ranked seventh in Africa.
Had the system remained operational, it would have introduced a new pre-travel requirement for travelers from those 29 countries. Because the system failed before it could operate as intended, the AVOI did not count it against Mozambique's openness score.
A working digital border can cost a country points. A broken one can cost it nothing. That is not a statement about Mozambique. It is a statement about what the index is capable of measuring.
The system is no longer broken. Mozambique relaunched a new eVisa and ETA platform on 11 February 2026, powered by VFS Global. The official portal is operational and currently directs eligible travelers to apply online, while approved applicants receive a document to present for boarding and on arrival.
But only three of those 29 countries are African: Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Senegal. The other 26 are outside Africa.
That means the AVOI, which measures how open a country is to the other 53 African countries, could see only a small part of what Mozambique's ETA system was doing. Most of the nationalities affected were outside the population the index is designed to measure.
The limitation becomes even clearer when you look at the current portal.
Nigeria is one of six nationalities that cannot apply through Mozambique's online visa system at all. The official portal directs nationals of Nigeria, alongside Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nepal and Somalia, to apply for a visa at a Mozambican embassy instead.
So Mozambique's border is not simply becoming digital. It is becoming digital selectively. For some travelers, the journey begins online. For others, the online system is not available and the route still runs through an embassy.
That distinction is important because the AVOI is designed to measure African visa openness, while the digital systems being introduced by African states increasingly operate across different nationalities, different visa categories and different levels of access.
The index can measure the countries that fall within its framework. It cannot fully capture what happens inside the digital border itself, including who can use it, who cannot, and what happens to travelers who are directed outside the system altogether.
And that is the more interesting question raised by Mozambique.
Digitalization does not automatically mean greater openness. It can make entry easier for one group of travelers while leaving another group subject to a more traditional and more burdensome process.
An openness index can capture whether a visa is required. It may not capture how that requirement works in practice, or whether different nationalities face different routes to entry.
Three reasons this matters beyond the rankings
First, because these numbers are part of the evidence base for African integration.
The African Union's free movement agenda, and the broader argument that a continental market requires people to move as well as goods, are often made using visa openness figures. The 2025 AVOI recorded a fall in the continental average to 0.448, below each of the previous three editions.
If part of that decline reflects countries digitizing their border processes rather than actually restricting movement, then the integration debate is being guided by a signal that may not be telling the whole story.
Second, because the way openness is measured can shape policy incentives.
A country that replaces a slow, expensive and discretionary visa process with a fast digital system may see its measured openness fall if the new system requires pre-travel authorization. A country that leaves its paper-based visa system unchanged faces no equivalent penalty.
Whatever else that tells us, it is a strange incentive to place in front of an immigration ministry.
Third, because the distinction is not theoretical for the person trying to travel.
An ETA may be easier than a visa for a traveler with reliable internet, a functioning payment card and documents that match across systems. It is not necessarily easier for a trader, a student or someone travelling to visit family, particularly where digital access, payment systems or documentation create additional barriers.
The indices may be debating definitions. Travelers experience the consequences.
That makes the institutions behind these measurements worth understanding too.
The Henley Openness Index is published by Henley & Partners, a private residence and citizenship advisory firm. The Africa Visa Openness Index is published by the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission. They are different institutions, with different purposes and different reasons for measuring openness. That does not make either methodology suspect, nor does it make their definitions arbitrary. It simply matters when interpreting what each index is designed to measure.
There is another layer worth watching, although it belongs to a different investigation.
The Seychelles Electronic Border System carries the copyright of Travizory Border Security SA, a private company. The consent screen travelers must accept also includes an optional tick-box for third-party offers.
Mozambique's rebuilt portal, meanwhile, was delivered with VFS Global, the same outsourced provider whose R1,550 service fee South Africa is now proposing to replace with a R500 charge collected by the state.
None of this, on its own, establishes that anything improper is happening. But as African governments move more of their border processing into privately built and operated systems, another question becomes part of the mobility story: who operates the digital border, what information does the system collect, and what happens to that information beyond the act of admitting a traveler?
The questions
The AVOI is not naive about any of this. It explicitly warns that ETAs should not become visas in disguise. Where countries that already offer visa-free or visa-on-arrival access introduce them, it recommends that the authorizations be cost-free and limited to basic information requirements.
It also treats South Africa's forthcoming ETA differently, on the grounds that it replaces a consular visa process for travelers who already require a visa rather than adding a new pre-travel requirement for people who previously did not.
That is a considered position. It also makes the disagreement with Henley harder to explain, not easier.
So we have put the following questions to the institutions involved.
To the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission:
The Seychelles eTA is mandatory before departure, but travelers who arrive without one can still submit an application on arrival, pay a €30 penalty and wait for approval before proceeding through immigration. Given that the AVOI methodology contains a visa-on-arrival category weighted at 0.8, why was Seychelles scored at zero rather than placed in that middle category?
If the AVOI recommends that ETAs should be cost-free and limited to basic information requirements where they apply to travelers who would otherwise enter visa-free or obtain a visa on arrival, is Seychelles being penalized because of the way its authorization is designed, or because the authorization exists at all?
The African Development Bank responded to these questions. On the classification, it said the report assesses visa openness based on the requirements stipulated in the IATA database, in order to maintain a consistent methodological approach, and that during the data collection period from June to August 2025 the IATA database recorded the Seychelles ETA as required ahead of travel and compulsory.
That answer moves the question somewhere unexpected. Henley's methodology also states that its data derives from IATA. Both indices are reading the same underlying database, and arriving at 54th of 54 and 2nd of 199 for the same country.
On South Africa's proposed R500 fee, the Bank said the AVOI encourages the easing of movement across Africa's borders but that it could not comment on individual countries' proposed processing fees.
Responses attributable to the African Development Bank Group.
To Henley & Partners:
Does the fact that Seychelles allows travelers without prior approval to complete the eTA process on arrival explain its classification as open, despite the government's requirement for airlines to verify an approved authorization before boarding?
And how does Guinea-Bissau receive a perfect openness score while operating an e-Visa portal, when Henley's methodology states that an e-Visa requiring government approval before departure scores zero?
To the Government of Seychelles:
Can a Travel Authorization application be refused? If so, on what grounds, and how many applications have been refused since the system was introduced?
We will publish the responses, or record their absence.
What this is really about
The easiest conclusion is that one of the two indices is simply wrong. Another is that Seychelles is quietly closing its border. Neither gets to the real issue, and frankly speaking, that isn’t the point of this article.
The point is that Africa is building digital borders faster than anyone has worked out how to describe them.
An ETA is not one thing. Seychelles runs one that is compulsory before departure but can still be completed after arrival, subject to a penalty. Mozambique introduced one and suspended it. Kenya introduced one and later waived it. Morocco used one for a football tournament. South Africa is building one that replaces a visa rather than adding a new requirement to visa-free travel.
These are not minor variations on the same instrument. They are different border systems carrying the same name.
What is missing from the vocabulary is a clear category for pre-clearance: permission that must be obtained before normal entry, but does not operate like a conventional visa. Seychelles sits somewhere in that space. Neither index has a particularly good way of classifying it. Until that gap is addressed, similar digital systems will continue to produce very different scores.
There is another gap underneath it.
The AVOI's measure is heavily shaped by whether a traveler needs permission before travel. It does not distinguish between an authorization that is free and one that is expensive, one that takes seconds and one that takes days, one that asks for basic information and one that demands extensive documentation. A working system and a suspended one can also produce the same result if the underlying requirement is treated the same way.
That is a defensible choice. A requirement is a requirement.
But it is also a blind spot, and it becomes more important as more African countries move border processing online.
None of this is really about Seychelles. Seychelles is simply where the gap became visible.
The bigger question is whether Africa's visa openness indices are still measuring the kind of borders African countries are now building. Are the indices keeping up with the borders they are supposed to measure?
For the traveler, there is one question that matters at the airport: can I board without first getting permission from the country I am flying to?
That is the question at the heart of this debate. And it is the question the current classifications do not always answer cleanly.
Which leaves the question the continent still has not settled:
Is an open border one you can cross without asking permission, or one where permission is easy to get?
Until that distinction is settled, governments can keep announcing that they are opening their borders while an index records a restriction. And, depending on which definition they are using, both can point to the numbers and say they are right.
Correction, 7 August 2026. This article originally reported that the requirements described in the AVOI report did not appear in the Government of Seychelles' published application requirements, and asked the report's authors where the description came from. That was wrong. The requirements are set out in the FAQ section of the Seychelles Electronic Border System, which the African Development Bank has confirmed as its source. We were working from the summary page rather than the FAQ. The passage has been corrected and the question withdrawn.