African ordinary passports: Burkina Faso electronic short-entry visa with fee waiver
The Council of Ministers’ current Africa-wide fee-waiver decision expressly says the waiver is not a visa exemption. The official Embassy guidance requires online entry-visa applications and emails an eVisa for presentation at the border. This maps the catalog’s foreign ordinary passports of African states to the advance electronic short-visitor route.
- The 11 September 2025 decision removes visa fees for nationals of African countries but expressly retains the visa requirement. It does not provide a visa-free ordinary-passport cohort, a duration, or a statutory exemption from normal immigration, health, security and admissibility checks.
- The Embassy says that, since 1 February 2023, entry-visa applications are online; after approval, the applicant receives an email attachment labelled “EVISA” and presents it on arrival. It describes transit visas (1–5 days) and short-stay visas (1–90 days); tourism is within the short-stay visitor purpose and business, work, residence and long stay are not normalized here.
- The official portal and embassy distinguish ordinary-passport electronic applications from diplomatic, service and UN laissez-passer applications. The latter, refugee, alien, emergency and other special travel documents are outside this policy.
- A live National Police page says land-border and Ouagadougou-airport short visas may be issued to foreign travellers. Its stated fee is incompatible with the 2025 nationwide African fee waiver and with the newer Visa Burkina fee schedule. That page has no publication or update date and conflicts with the Embassy’s online-only wording, so it is retained as a material operational conflict rather than used to normalize an all-nationality visa_on_arrival route.
- ECOWAS’s 2025 transitional statement continues visa-free movement for Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger citizens in ECOWAS states until further notice. It does not publish a reciprocal inbound ordinary-passport exemption at Burkina Faso after its withdrawal; the newer Burkina Faso Government decision controls the African visitor cohort modeled here.
- A valid passport, short-visit supporting documents, a return/onward arrangement, vaccination or health documents, entry-port controls, individual decision/refusal and security checks may be required. Approval is not a guarantee of admission.
53 passport nationalities covered
Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoro Islands, Congo (Rep.), Congo (Dem. Rep.), Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, eSwatini, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe