From the Abuja Treaty to the Present Reality Since the signing of the Abuja Treaty establishing the African Economic Community in 1991, which entered into force in 1994, the member states of the Organisation of African Unity — later the African Union — committed to the progressive removal of barriers to the movement of persons, goods, and capital as a precondition for a continental common market. Yet over three decades, the free movement of persons has remained the weakest link in the integration process, lagging well behind progress achieved in trade and investment.
This ambition found institutional expression in Agenda 2063, adopted by the African Union in 2013, and in the launch of the African Union Passport in 2016 as a symbol of continental identity. It reached its legal culmination with the adoption, in Addis Ababa in January 2018, of the Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of Establishment.
The implementation record, however, reveals a marked divergence between continental commitment and national practice. While the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has entered into force and been ratified by the vast majority of member states, the Free Movement Protocol remains, as of mid-2026, far from entry into force: only four states — Rwanda, Niger, Mali, and São Tomé and Príncipe — have ratified it, out of the fifteen ratifications required (Free Move Hub, 2024; ECOWAS Parliament, 2026). The picture is further complicated by the withdrawal of Mali and Niger — both among the original ratifying states — from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2024, and their formation, together with Burkina Faso, of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), which threatens the integration gains achieved in West Africa (Africa Visa Openness Report, 2024).
Within this institutional vacuum, a number of states have pursued unilateral national initiatives to open their borders to African citizens, independent of a binding continental framework. The Africa Visa Openness Index (AVOI), published jointly by the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission, documents a gradual — though partial and uneven — expansion of this trend. This article analyses the phenomenon in light of specialised African academic literature and assesses it as a practical, if incomplete, step toward continental integration.
The Legal and Institutional Framework of Free Movement Adeola (2019) argues that the adoption of the 2018 Protocol represents a continental response to rising intra-African migration and part of the African Union's broader effort to forge a shared African identity transcending colonially inherited borders. Agenda 2063 explicitly links the removal of visa requirements for African citizens to the deepening of the continent's economic and political integration.
The Protocol adopts a phased, three-stage approach: visa-free entry, followed by the right of residence, and finally the right of establishment and employment. Studies by the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union Commission (ECA & AUC, 2023) attribute the slow pace of ratification to a complex mix of factors, including security considerations and border management concerns, alongside anxieties over economic imbalances stemming from disparities in development levels among member states.
Rita Amukhobu, coordinator of the Free Movement Programme at the African Union Commission, has stressed the need for "a more holistic approach involving ministries of labour, migration, education, and trade" in the governance of mobility — one that moves beyond the narrow sectoral treatment that has characterised the issue to date.
Leading States in Border Openness: A Critical Reading of 2024–2026 Data A rigorous analysis requires distinguishing between two levels of "openness": full visa-free entry for all African citizens, on the one hand, and facilitated entry through e-visas or visas on arrival, on the other — a distinction largely absent from journalistic accounts that have cited a figure of "nine countries" without a clearly defined classification criterion.
According to the latest edition of the Africa Visa Openness Index (2024), only four states qualify as full "champions" granting visa-free entry to all African citizens: Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles — the same four countries that topped the previous edition of the index (AfDB & AUC, 2024). Ghana, Kenya, and Togo, while ranking among the index's top twenty performers, rely primarily on e-visa or visa-on-arrival systems, which secure a high ranking without amounting to a full waiver of the visa requirement.
Structurally, the higher-performing states can be grouped into three categories: First, ECOWAS member states — Benin, The Gambia, Ghana, and Togo — which benefit from the legacy of the regional free-movement protocol adopted in 1979, still the highest-scoring regional bloc on the index despite recent fractures caused by the withdrawal of the Sahel states (AVOI, 2024). Second, the two East African Community (EAC) states — Rwanda and Kenya — with Rwanda among the earliest ratifiers of the continental Protocol, while Kenya has adopted comparable unilateral national policies (notably its Electronic Travel Authorisation, ETA) without proceeding to formal ratification. Third, states pursuing individual initiatives outside any actively engaged regional bloc on this issue, most notably Seychelles, alongside declarations of intent by Chad and the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) regarding similar systems — declarations that, based on available sources to date, remain at a preparatory stage and have not yet been translated into documented practice.
Index data show that the share of states permitting visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry rose from roughly 25% in 2018 to close to 28% in recent years; however, the aggregate index score registered a slight decline, from 0.485 in 2023 to 0.479 in 2024 (AfDB & AUC, 2024), reflecting the fragility of this progress and its vulnerability to reversal, particularly amid recent regional political upheavals.
The Economic Rationale: Free Movement as a Precondition for AfCFTA A growing consensus in the economic literature holds that trade and human mobility are structurally interdependent. A study by the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) concludes that the relationship between the free movement of goods under AfCFTA and the free movement of persons under the continental Protocol is a necessary condition for realising the full benefits of economic integration, particularly in services and regional value chains.
Francis Ikome, of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, emphasises that facilitating labour mobility and the portability of migrants' skills is decisive in enabling African states — Kenya among them — to fully benefit from AfCFTA. This argument gained further weight in May 2026, when the First Deputy Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament warned that the continued stalling of free movement risks hollowing out AfCFTA's substance for the continent's roughly 1.5 billion inhabitants (Africa Prosperity Network, 2026).
In practical terms, open borders translate into a tangible reduction in "transaction costs" borne by small-scale traders, academic researchers, and cross-border service providers, while supporting regional value chains in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and digital services — sectors directly dependent on the cross-border mobility of skilled labour.
Structural Barriers: Why Do the Continent's Major Economies Hesitate? A reference study by the Migration Policy Centre (Mehari, 2019) identifies six principal barriers to activating continental free movement, which can be condensed into three main axes:
First, political and sovereignty-related barriers, rooted in the nation-state's conception of border control as an essential expression of sovereignty, compounded by what the literature describes as a mutual "trust deficit" between governments, particularly amid cross-border security tensions.
Second, economic and social concerns, highlighted by officials such as Kenyan legislator Geofrey Odanga, who has noted that fears of job displacement and pressure on public services fuel xenophobic sentiment and weaken the political will needed to permit free movement of labour.
Third, overlapping membership in regional blocs: many African states belong simultaneously to more than one regional grouping (such as ECOWAS and the newly formed AES), creating conflicting legal obligations that complicate the harmonisation of continental regimes.
As a result of these combined factors, the continent's leading economies — Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and Ethiopia — remain, as of this writing, outside the circle of states that have ratified the continental Protocol, despite the decisive demographic and economic weight they represent for any effective continental integration.
From Rhetoric to Reality: A Critical Assessment Moving from institutional rhetoric to actual practice requires acknowledging three essential observations.
First, these initiatives are fundamentally national rather than binding continental commitments; the Protocol has not yet entered into force, and each state therefore applies its border policies according to its own sovereign and security calculations rather than under a shared treaty obligation.
Second, "visa-free" does not necessarily mean "unregulated." All the states concerned retain the right to review entry documents and verify identity. Kenya offers an illustrative example, having replaced the traditional visa system with an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) that achieves the practical purpose of facilitation without fully relinquishing border control mechanisms.
Third, a notable gap exists between citizen and government positions: multiple studies indicate that, in opinion polls and field surveys, African citizens display markedly greater openness to continental free movement than their governments do — a representational gap that merits further comparative political research.
A number of scholars view "selective reform" as a viable practical exit: opening visa policy first to defined categories such as professionals, business people, and investors, following the model observed in South America's regional integration process, as a preparatory step that is politically less costly than immediate, comprehensive openness.
Toward Gradual Integration The opening of a limited number of African states to the continent's citizens does not resolve the underlying challenge of continental integration in the domain of free movement, yet it contributes to building cumulative momentum that cannot be dismissed. It constitutes a practical embodiment of the growing recognition that the continent's social and economic development benefits directly from a wider margin of intra-African mobility, as affirmed by the African Union Commission in its periodic reports on "progress made in developing and adopting visa-openness solutions for African citizens, and in strengthening the principle of positive reciprocity" among member states.
The fundamental challenge, however, remains the transition from scattered national initiatives to a unified, legally binding continental policy — one capable of sustaining current gains and shielding them from transient political setbacks, of the kind recently witnessed in West Africa. Until that transition occurs, the African citizen crossing from Accra to Kigali without a visa will remain a living example of the possibility of continental unity, and, at the same time, a reminder that the road toward comprehensive, binding free movement remains long.