Europe visa rejections cost Africans $70 million in 2024

When Joel Anyaegbu’s application for a Schengen visa to travel to Barcelona was denied late last year, he was shocked but quickly re-submitted. he submitted additional documents than were required, including bank statements and proof of property ownership in Nigeria. He was rejected again.

“The information submitted regarding the justification for the purpose and conditions of the intended stay were not reliable,” read a checklist returned with his passport from the Spanish consulate in Lagos. The 32-year-old gaming consultant said he felt embarrassed.

He told CNN that “I had to cancel meetings with partners at the conference I was attending. I emailed the embassy to understand why I was denied but it has not been answered to date.”

Anyaegbu’s was part of the 50,376 short-stay Schengen visa applications rejected in Nigeria last year, almost 50% of submissions, as per a newly released data from the European Commission. Applicants worldwide pay a non-refundable visa fee of 90 euros. Nigerians alone lost over 4.5 million euros (about $5 million) asking permission to travel to the 29 European countries that make up the Schengen Area. Analysis from the LAGO Collective shows that, African countries lost 60 million euros ($67.5 million) in rejected Schengen visa fees in 2024. The London-based research and arts organization has been analyzing data on European short-term visas from 2022 and says Africa is the continent worst impacted by the cost  of visa rejections.

Marta Foresti told CNN that “The poorest countries in the world pay the richest countries in the world money for not getting visas,.” “As in 2023, the poorer the country of application, the higher the rejection percentage. African countries suffered higher rejection rate as high as 40-50% for countries like Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria.” She says this proves “systemic bias and discrimination” in the process.

An European Commission spokesperson told CNN that member states consider visa applications on a individual assessment. The spokesperson said via email that “Each file is assessed by experienced decision-makers on its own merits, in particular regarding the purpose of stay, sufficient means of subsistence, and the applicants’ will to return to their country of residence after a visit to the EU.”

Africans have long complained about unpredictable, sometimes unaccountable decisions about who gets approved or denied in the process of European visas application.

Jean Mboulé, a Cameroonian, was born in France but when he applied for a visa in 2022 with his wife using similar documents, his application was rejected but hers was accepted.

He told CNN that “At the time she was unemployed but with a South African passport.

She had no income but received a visa on the back of my financial statement. But the embassy said they refused my application because my documents were fake, and they weren’t sure I would come back to South Africa, where I am a permanent resident, if I went to France.”

The 39-year-old regional executive filed a lawsuit in French courts and won, forcing the French embassy in Johannesburg to grant his visa and pay him a fine of 1,200 euros.

He made it clear to  an administrative tribunal in the French city of Nantes that the embassy’s decision to deny him a visa was “compromised by weak justification.”

The LAGO Collective’s Foresti said “The financial cost of rejected visas is just staggering; you can think of them as ‘reverse remittances,’ money flowing from poor to rich countries, which we never hear about.” Schengen visa fees rose from 80 to 90 euros in July 2024, making it even more expensive for the world’s poorest applicants.