Policy & Governance
Visa regimes, ministerial decisions and the institutional architecture that determines whether tourism revenue is captured, retained and reinvested. The Sovereign Tourism Architecture framework treats tourism not as an industry the state regulates, but as a sector the state must architect to capture value within its own economy.
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.
Africa's leaders adopted a free-movement protocol in January 2018 and a continental free-trade area two months later, meant to move goods and people together. Seven years on, the trade area is operational while the mobility protocol has four ratifications, the most recent in July 2019. Into that vacuum, individual states moved alone with opposite results: Rwanda opened to every African visa-free and scored a perfect 1.000 on the AfDB index; Kenya announced the same opening, executed it as a fee-bearing digital pre-authorisation, and fell seventeen places. On the one lever a state controls completely, the announcement is not the policy.
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