Africans lost €60 million in Schengen Visa Fees in 2024
African applicants lost nearly €60 million (approximately $67.5 million) in non-refundable Schengen visa fees in 2024, according to data from the LAGO Collective, a London-based research group focused on global mobility.
The report highlights that African countries were disproportionately affected by high visa rejection rates and increasing application costs. For example, Nigeria saw more than 50,000 short-stay visa applications denied last year, as reported by CNN.
With the standard non-refundable visa fee set at €90 (around $100), Nigerian applicants alone lost over €4.5 million ($5 million) in unsuccessful attempts to secure entry to the 29 European countries comprising the Schengen Area.
“The poorest countries in the world pay the richest countries in the world money for not getting visas,” said Marta Foresti, founder of the LAGO Collective, in an interview with CNN. She noted a continuing trend from 2023, where countries with lower incomes experienced higher rejection rates.
Rejection rates for African countries such as Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria ranged from 40% to 50%. Foresti characterized this pattern as evidence of “systemic discrimination and bias” embedded in the visa application process.
She further described the financial impact as a form of “reverse remittances,” where money flows from poorer nations to wealthier European states, without any benefit or return to the applicants.
Supporting this analysis, a separate report from Henley & Partners found that in 2023, African applicants were twice as likely to be denied Schengen visas as their Asian counterparts, despite submitting half as many applications.
Six of the ten countries with the highest rejection rates are in Africa. Comoros topped the list with a 61.3% rejection rate, followed by Guinea-Bissau (51%), Ghana (47.5%), Mali (46.1%), Sudan (42.3%), and Senegal (41.2%).
