Four African countries have ratified the continent's free-movement protocol in seven years. The trade deal moves goods faster than the continent moves people.

In January 2018, in Addis Ababa, African heads of state adopted two agreements within eight weeks of one another. The first was the Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of Establishment. The second was the agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area. They were designed as a pair, the logic being that goods and people should move together, since it is people who trade. Seven years later the pair has come apart in the most revealing way. The free-trade area has been ratified by most of the continent and is in its operational phase. The free-movement protocol has been ratified by four countries, Mali, Niger, Rwanda and São Tomé and Príncipe, against the fifteen required to bring it into force, and the most recent of those ratifications, by Niger, was in July 2019.1 The African Development Bank, whose own index tracks this, calls the divergence a curious anomaly. It is the starting point for understanding how African tourism actually moves.

The Sovereign Tourism Architecture framework, which this publication has used to read the Rwanda gorilla-permit economy and the Virunga model, holds that what determines whether a state captures tourism value is not its position in the global economy but its institutional capacity to execute. Visa policy is the purest test of that proposition, because it is the one lever a state controls completely. No airline, no foreign operator, no exchange rate stands between a government and its own entry stamp. And yet the gap between what states announce at the border and what they deliver there turns out to be the widest gap in African tourism policy. The protocol is the continental version of that gap. The Kenyan case is the national one.

The trade deal moved; the people did not

The protocol's failure to launch is not a failure of drafting or of ambition. Its ideals are widely endorsed, it codifies a commitment to free movement first made at Abuja in 1991, and it sits at the centre of the African Union's Agenda 2063. What has stalled it is documented plainly by the institutions pushing it. At coordination meetings through 2025, in Accra and Mombasa, African Union and Economic Commission for Africa officials named the obstacles: security concerns around cross-border crime and terrorism, weak and unharmonised border systems, a perceived loss of sovereignty over who a state admits, and in places outright anti-immigrant sentiment.2 These are not trivial. They are the reasons a finance ministry will sign a trade agreement in a month and leave a mobility agreement unratified for seven years. Goods do not overstay their visas. Goods do not compete for jobs. The asymmetry in how fast the two 2018 agreements moved is a precise measure of how much more politically frightening the movement of people is than the movement of cargo, even to governments that publicly want both.

The consequence is that the continental framework does very little. By the 2025 Africa Visa Openness Index, produced by the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission, only about 28 percent of intra-African travel routes are visa-free.3 An African travelling within Africa still faces a visa requirement on most of the continent, a restriction that falls hardest on the ordinary traveller, the trader, the student and the tourist, and lightest on the diplomatic passport. The single market in goods is being built on top of a fragmented market in people.

The index that measures the gap

Because the protocol stalled, the real story of African mobility is not continental but national, and it is a story of unilateral action moving faster than any treaty. The 2025 Africa Visa Openness Index, the tenth annual edition, is the authoritative record of it. Four countries, Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda and Seychelles, had opened fully to African visitors. The number of countries offering electronic visas had risen to 31, some 57 percent of the continent, up from nine in 2016.3 On its face this is progress, and in part it is. But the 2025 index carries a finding that complicates the celebration, and it is the finding a serious reading has to sit with: the continent's combined openness score fell to 0.445, its lowest level since 2021, below each of the three preceding years.3

Two things drove the regression, and both matter for how tourism ministries should read their own reforms. The first is outright reversal. During 2025, four countries, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Nigeria and Somalia, moved from broad visa-on-arrival policies back to requiring a visa ahead of travel, a step backward for the ordinary African traveller.3 The second is subtler and more instructive. The African Development Bank's methodology treats an electronic visa as what it is: a visa still required before travel. An e-Visa may be more convenient than a paper one, but it moves the checkpoint from the destination's arrival hall to the traveller's departure country, and it is not the same thing as visa-free entry. Seychelles is the index's cautionary example. Its move to an electronic travel authorisation, categorised as an e-Visa because it must be secured ahead of arrival and carries similar cost and information requirements, pulled its ranking down despite being presented as modernisation.3

Two neighbours, one promise, opposite executions

The clearest proof that execution is the whole of the policy sits in East Africa, where two governments made the same announcement within weeks of each other and produced opposite results. In November 2023, Rwanda declared that any African could travel to the country without a visa and without a fee, pitching the continent as a single tourism destination. The African Development Bank's index scored Rwanda a perfect 1.000, joining the small group of fully open states. Weeks later, in December 2023, Kenya's president announced that Kenya would become visa-free for all travellers from January 2024. The announcement was greeted, in the tourism sector and beyond, as the bolder of the two.4

What Kenya actually built was not visa-free entry. It was a mandatory Electronic Travel Authorisation, applied for online at least three days ahead of travel, carrying a processing fee of about thirty dollars, required of nearly every nationality including Africans who had previously entered on arrival or free.4 The Institute for Security Studies, reviewing the outcome, recorded the consequence bluntly: because the authorisation functioned as a digital barrier to entry despite being framed as progressive, Kenya fell seventeen places on the openness index, to 46th of 54 African countries, having previously ranked among the continent's more open.4 A policy sold as the removal of a barrier had, by the measure that counts, added one. The uncertainty around the new system disrupted last-minute bookings and conference travel, the precise high-value segments a tourism economy most wants to attract.4

To Kenya's credit, the framework corrected. Following feedback from the African Union and the tourism sector, a 2025 Cabinet decision exempted citizens of nearly all African nations from the authorisation, and the processing was automated to clear most applicants within a day.4 The recovery is real and worth crediting. But the episode is the framework's thesis in miniature: the same sovereign lever, pulled by two neighbouring states with the same stated intention, produced a perfect score in one country and a seventeen-place fall in the other, and the entire difference was administrative execution, not political will.

The honest limit of the openness case

There is a version of this argument that goes too far, and it should be named. Openness is not costless, and the states that hesitate are not merely timid. The 2025 index itself notes that lower-income and landlocked countries dominate the top of the openness table, while higher-income countries, which offer more economic opportunity and therefore attract more inward migration pressure, display more caution, and that this caution is a rational response to real sensitivities rather than simple backwardness.3 A government weighing security integration, border-system capacity and labour-market pressure against the tourism receipts of easier entry is making a genuine trade-off, not merely failing an exam. The Corridor's claim is narrower and survives that objection: whatever a state decides at the level of policy, the execution should match the announcement, because the widest and least defensible losses in African tourism come not from countries that choose to stay closed but from countries that announce they are open and then are not.

Three tests over the next year

The first test is the protocol itself. The African Union set a target of reaching the fifteen-ratification threshold by the end of 2025; whether it does, or whether a phased approach led by willing regional blocs overtakes the continental route, will determine if there is ever a legal floor beneath African mobility or only the shifting patchwork of national decisions.2 The second is whether the regional communities, the EAC and ECOWAS above all, continue to outperform the continental framework, since the freest movement in Africa today exists inside those blocs rather than under the AU treaty, and the most plausible path to continental free movement may be regional integration scaled up rather than a treaty ratified down.5 The third is executional honesty: whether governments announcing visa-free reforms build them as genuine visa-free entry or as fee-bearing electronic authorisations that raise the index against them, because the traveller, the trader and the tourism operator experience the difference immediately even when the press release does not admit it. Kenya and Rwanda ran that experiment already. The results are on the record, and the announcement was never the policy.