Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs) drive economic and social integration in Africa, often among countries that appear to have little in common. The African Union recognizes eight RECs and considers them building blocks for deepening regional integration on the continent. RECs pursue integration at different levels. For example, they might cooperate on customs, the movement of people, or the development of infrastructure. Some RECs afford their members preferential terms for the cross-border trade of goods and services, while others coordinate a regional response to natural disasters or health emergencies. Many RECs cooperate politically as well. Coordinating their members’ policies in areas of common interest tends to improve sociocultural cohesion in the region, increase peace and security, and generate economic benefits from more regional trade. Last year’s AVOI report found that in terms of visa openness, Africa’s RECs had rebounded from the pandemic, in some cases fully reversing the temporary restrictions that they had imposed to curb the spread of the virus. It is therefore especially encouraging to note that six of eight RECs improved their average AVOI score again this year. The EAC increased the most, followed by IGAD, COMESA, ECCAS, CEN-SAD, and ECOWAS. The scores of SADC and AMU are only marginally lower than last year.
Looking back further, in six of eight RECs, average visa openness is higher today than it was in pre-pandemic 2019. Even SADC and AMU, whose scores are slightly lower in 2023 than they were in 2022, have a higher average score today than in 2019.
In many ways, Africa’s RECs are the continent’s pioneers on visa openness. RECs frequently acknowledge that more trade in goods and services, greater prosperity, and more integrated and thriving communities depend on people’s capacity to move across borders smoothly and inexpensively. This has spurred several RECs to implement protocols on free movement in tandem with trade agreements, in order to open their members’ borders to the citizens of the region. Yet the free movement of people varies considerably between RECs, and sometimes within RECs. In some cases, free movement never moves beyond a REC’s founding instruments—mobility within the region is not the object of policies or action plans, and the region’s citizens have difficulty crossing the borders of neighbouring countries. In other cases, protocols on free movement are negotiated and signed, but are not widely implemented. For a few RECs, however, the intra-regional movement of people is a key pillar of integration and their member states grant each other’s citizens entry, visa-free. To analyze visa openness at the regional level, the AVOI averages the scores of all the countries that are members of a given REC. This metric produces an average score for each of the eight RECs recognized by the African Union. Comparing the score of Africa’s eight RECs reveals not only the degree to which the member states of each bloc open their borders to the citizens of other countries in the bloc, but to some extent, the degree to which that REC has a liberal visa policy that its members actually apply.
In some RECs, members’ visa regimes adhere closely to the principle of reciprocity: the practice of extending the same visa privileges to each other as the privileges they receive. Reciprocity makes no claims about visa openness. It merely measures the symmetry of the visa policies that countries apply towards each other’s citizens. Essentially, reciprocity can reveal the harmonization of visa policies within a REC. Reciprocity is measured as a percentage. A REC with an overall reciprocity score of 60%, for example, is a region in which 60% of the visa policies that its members extend to each other, are the same as the visa policies they are offered in exchange. The remaining 40% of individual country-to-country policies differ.
In this system, a high reciprocity score indicates that policies are largely harmonized. For example, Cabo Verde allows Zambians to obtain a visa on arrival, and Zambia allows Cabo Verdeans to do the same. Similarly, Algeria offers visa-free entry to Tunisians, and Tunisia offers Algerians the same. A low reciprocity score often indicates that policies are mismatched. For example, Central African Republic requires Burkinabe to obtain a visa before travelling, but Burkina Faso allows Central Africans to enter visa-free. The best scenario—the scenario shown in the RECs’ statistics in this report—is high visa-free reciprocity. This occurs when a region’s countries allow the region’s citizens to enter their territory, visa-free. In all cases, a REC’s reciprocity score not only reflects the domestic policies of the REC’s member states, but may be an indicator of the presence (or absence) of a REC policy on free movement to which the REC’s members adhere.
Sometimes, a country ranks highly on the AVOI (the index that ranks all countries on the continent) even though its REC scores low on visa-free reciprocity. This happens when the country’s visa policy towards the citizens of African countries in general is more open than the visa policies its citizens confront when they travel within their REC. A variation of this scenario occurs when a REC’s member state is more open to visitors from other countries on the continent than to the citizens of countries that are fellow members of their REC. In other words, the member state’s visa regime is generally more hospitable to the citizens of non-REC members than to the citizens of some of its fellow REC members. Situations like this can occur for different reasons. For example, the member state may belong to two RECs, one whose members have implemented the REC’s protocol to ease travel and migration, and the other that either does not have such a protocol or whose members have not yet implemented it. Or the member state may simply be reciprocating the inhospitable visa regime of countries within its REC. This is not uncommon, and shows that sometimes, visa openness goes beyond technical considerations. In either case, discrepancies in visa policies can flag room for improvement and encourage RECs to continue to break ground on visa openness.
The charts on visa reciprocity in the following section depict the extent to which the three types of visa policies measured by the AVOI (visa-free, visa on arrival, and visa before travel) are reciprocated among the member states of the eight RECs recognized by the African Union. The charts rank countries in descending order of reciprocal visa openness: at the top are those countries whose visa-free policies are reciprocated the most by others within the REC. Countries’ rankings in the reciprocity charts do not relate to countries’ rankings on the AVOI. Neither do they necessarily reflect the average visa openness of each country’s REC. Instead, they show the extent to which countries’ visa policies—whether liberal or restrictive—are reciprocated by the other members of their REC. From a policy perspective, high levels of visa-free reciprocity suggest more cohesion on visa policy within a REC, and may reflect liberal regional migration policies and higher implementation by the REC’s member states. If a country ranks highly on the AVOI but experiences low visa-free reciprocity within its REC, the cause may be that its REC has not developed a structure for harmonizing its members’ visa policies. It could also be that the country’s fellow REC members do not reciprocate the country’s visa-open stance.
