Africa Is Quietly Erasing Its Own Borders

A decade after visa openness became a slogan at African Union summits, a small but growing group of countries is proving that a borderless continent is no longer just an aspiration. Rwanda, Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Togo and the Republic of Congo have unilaterally scrapped visa requirements for fellow Africans, and a single air transport market now links 124 routes and an estimated $75 billion in economic output. The numbers suggest openness is real, but takes time.

For years, the fastest way for a trader in Accra to reach a client in Kigali was often to fly through Europe. A Ghanaian entrepreneur could clear immigration in Paris or Amsterdam with barely a glance from an officer, then face a stack of paperwork on landing in an African capital just a few hours’ flight from home. That contradiction, air travel within Africa often harder than travel out of it, has defined the continent’s mobility problem for a generation. It is also, slowly, beginning to change.

A cluster of countries, led by Rwanda, Benin, Ghana, The Gambia, Seychelles, Kenya and now Togo and the Republic of Congo, have thrown open their doors to fellow Africans, betting that free movement, not just free trade, is what will finally stitch the continent’s fifty four economies into one market. Their experiment is being watched closely, because for most of Africa, crossing a border still means a visa, a fee and a wait.

What the numbers show

The clearest measure of that shift is the Africa Visa Openness Index 2025, jointly produced by the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission, which found that African citizens can now travel visa free on 28.2 percent of intra-continental routes, up from just 20 percent in 2016. Rwanda and The Gambia shared the top ranking this year, with Kenya climbing to third place and Benin close behind in fourth, according to the index’s tenth edition. Thirty nine countries have improved their scores since the index began tracking policy in 2016.

Yet the same report carries a warning. The continent’s combined openness score actually fell this year to 0.445, its lowest level since 2021, as several governments quietly swapped visa on arrival access for stricter pre travel requirements. At a policy dialogue in Abidjan marking the index’s tenth anniversary, Joy Kategekwa, the bank’s director of regional integration, said progress remained well below Africa’s ambitions, even as gains continue in pockets of the continent.

THE VISA OPENNESS GAP, IN NUMBERS

•  28.2% of intra-African travel routes are now visa free, up from 20% in 2016.
•  Only 4 of 55 African Union member states have ratified the 2018 Protocol on Free Movement of Persons.
•  Intra-African trade sits at roughly 16%, compared with more than 60% within the European Union. •  31 countries now offer e-visas, up from 9 in 2016, though visa-on-arrival access has actually declined since 2020.

The countries leading the way

Rwanda set the template. President Paul Kagame began granting visas on arrival to all Africans in 2013 and has since built one of the continent’s most open entry regimes, a policy credited with turning Kigali into a magnet for conferences and cross-border business. Benin followed in 2020, offering ninety day visa free stays to every African passport holder. Ghana, Seychelles and The Gambia have taken similar routes, while Kenya’s President William Ruto scrapped visa requirements for African visitors at the end of 2023, arguing that closed borders make entrepreneurs, not just tourists, the losers.

“When people cannot travel, business people cannot travel, entrepreneurs cannot travel, we all become net losers.”
President William Ruto, Kenya

That quote, delivered as Kenya prepared to open its borders, captured the logic driving the newest entrants. Togo introduced thirty day visa free entry for all Africans in May 2026, and the Republic of Congo has announced it will do the same from January 2027, a decision President Denis Sassou Nguesso unveiled in Brazzaville during the African Development Bank’s 2026 annual meetings. Congo now joins Benin, Togo, Rwanda, Ghana, Seychelles and The Gambia on the short list of countries treating African arrivals the way most countries treat their own citizens returning home.

Even so, that list remains an exception. Roughly 48 of Africa’s 54 recognised states still require some form of visa from most other Africans, and the African Union’s own free movement protocol, adopted in 2018, has been ratified by only four member states. Speaking at the same Abidjan dialogue, Melaku Desta of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa said the vision of an open continent was realistic but that political momentum remained slow, urging governments to convert research into action rather than leaving reform to a handful of pioneers.

What closed borders cost

The economic case for opening up is, by most measures, no longer in dispute. Intra-African trade remains one of the lowest of any region in the world, hovering around 16 percent of the continent’s total trade, compared with more than 60 percent among European Union members, according to reporting that draws on the visa openness data. Analysts tie that gap directly to mobility. Business travellers routing applications through weeks of paperwork, cross-border traders missing market windows, and investors choosing more accessible regions all represent what one recent commentary called a quiet tax on intra-African commerce, one that never appears in a trade ledger but compounds with every deal that never closes.

The fee structures make the point starkly. Nigeria charges foreign workers roughly 2,000 dollars a year for a work permit, according to recent trade press analysis, against roughly 777 dollars in South Africa and about 124 dollars for a two year permit in Rwanda. The African Union has framed the choice in blunt terms. Nnenna Nwabufo, the bank’s vice president for regional integration, told African leaders that an integrated continent will not happen by chance and requires bold leadership to dismantle visa barriers that continue to hold back trade, tourism and investment.

The African Continental Free Trade Area, which now links 54 countries into a market of 1.3 billion people worth an estimated 3.4 trillion dollars, is steadily lowering tariffs on goods. But officials increasingly argue that tariff reform alone cannot deliver on that promise. At a symposium on the sidelines of the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, delegates were blunt that Africa cannot build integrated markets or globally competitive firms while entrepreneurs remain constrained by restrictive visa regimes, since mobility, not tariffs, has become the deciding factor in whether the trade area’s promise is realised.

The skies are opening too

Land borders are only half the story. For decades it was often cheaper to fly from an African capital to Paris than to a neighbouring city, a legacy of protectionist bilateral agreements that shielded state airlines from competition. The African Union’s answer is the Single African Air Transport Market, first proposed under the 1999 Yamoussoukro Decision and formally launched in Addis Ababa in January 2018 by Kagame, then serving as African Union chairperson.

That project has gathered real momentum this year. Thirty eight countries have now signed on, representing more than 80 percent of the continent’s aviation market, and the initiative supports a network of 124 routes flown by 113 African airlines, carrying more than three million passengers and underpinning an estimated 8.1 million jobs and 75 billion dollars in economic output. In June, aviation ministers meeting in Lomé, Togo adopted a declaration committing to remove market access barriers and rein in the aviation taxes that keep African airfares among the highest in the world. Adefunke Adeyemi, the secretary general of the African Civil Aviation Commission, called the moment historic, saying the continent was finally clearing the runway for a single sky.

“We know what has to be done. We just have to do it.”
  President Paul Kagame, at the African Air Transport Convention, Lomé

Kagame, addressing that same summit, argued that African leaders had spent years describing integration without delivering it, noting that flying between two African cities still too often means routing through Europe or the Middle East. Rwanda’s own experience, he said, showed what openness could buy: more tourism, stronger business activity and expanded air links after Kigali adopted visa on arrival access for Africans and other travellers. Analysts at Georgetown University’s Journal of International Affairs have estimated that full implementation of the Yamoussoukro Decision could lift intra-African air traffic by as much as 141 percent and cut fares by up to 35 percent, gains that would ripple through tourism, trade and the airlines themselves.

A borderless Africa, unevenly built

None of this amounts to a Schengen style zone, and few officials pretend otherwise. Visa-free entry does not carry the right to work, settle or start a business, gaps the African Union’s free movement protocol was designed to close but which most governments have yet to formally accept. Security concerns in the Sahel, reliance on visa revenue and fears of labour migration to wealthier economies continue to make some capitals wary of following Kigali’s or Accra’s lead.

Still, the direction of travel, unlike much of the rest of the world, is toward openness rather than away from it. Every new country that scraps a visa requirement, every airline route added under the single air transport market, narrows the gap between the Africa its leaders describe in summit speeches and the one its citizens actually experience at the border. Whether that gap closes as a continental policy or, as it has so far, one country’s unilateral decision at a time, may end up mattering less than the fact that it is closing at all.

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