On the storm-scarred hillside of Roseau Valley, Dominica, the tiny Caribbean island nation, a passport is funding a geothermal plant for clean energy.
In Basseterre, St. Kitts, it once funded 60–70% of government revenue.
In Valletta, Malta, it helped topple a prime minister: Joseph Muscat resigned in December 2019 amid revelations linked to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist killed while probing golden passport corruption.
In São Tomé, fewer than 100 applications in four months have already sparked a new African frontier in the global market for citizenship.
This is the “business of belonging.”
The global citizenship-by-investment (CBI) industry, per MarketIntelo, a research firm, was valued at $5.2 billion in 2024, with analysts projecting it to hit $12.8 billion by 2033. While the data is scant, conservative estimates suggest that globally, at least 10,000 people apply yearly for second citizenships through Investment.
The investment migration industry is now a multi‑billion‑dollar business, with global programmes collectively raising over $20 billion as of 2022, and fuelling large volumes of real estate investment for sovereign countries.
For the 40 million people globally who now identify as digital nomads, including 18.5 million Americans, mobility has become an asset class. But mobility is no longer just about visas. It is about sovereignty and whether citizenship itself has become a tradable financial instrument.
The question is no longer whether passports can be sold. It is whether selling them strengthens or weakens the countries that do.
How citizenship became a revenue line
Modern citizenship-by-investment began in 1984, when St. Kitts and Nevis launched the first structured programme one year after independence. For two decades, it remained virtually dormant, with the country issuing only a few hundred passports.
The industry became scalable around 2006, when the model was streamlined into a three-to-six-month process: applicants choose between a government donation or an approved real estate investment. That template spread across the Caribbean: Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, and Saint Lucia all followed.
Beyond the islands, several other countries spotted the opportunity that investment migration programmes offered as an alternative—or buffer—to tourism, especially for countries that received fewer visitors each year, but were strategically placed near attractive global hubs.
In 2007, Cyprus launched the first European Union (EU) programme, and Malta followed suit in 2014. Türkiye entered in 2018, slashing its price to $250,000; it quickly became the world’s most popular golden passport programme.
After raising prices, a $400,000 minimum property investment in Türkiye now guarantees citizenship within three to eight months, provided investors keep their investment in place for at least 3 years. Türkiye offers visa-free access to roughly 140–150 countries, including the Schengen Area and the UK, increasing its appeal.
Small island developing states battered by hurricanes, tourism shocks, and the 2008 financial crisis saw these investment-based migration programmes as a much-needed gambit.
By fiscal year 2022/23, citizenship revenue accounted for 36.6% of Dominica’s gross domestic product (GDP). St. Kitts and Nevis’ revenue reached EC$620 million ($229 million) in 2023, up from EC$543 million ($200.9 million) in 2021.
That same year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) credited accumulated citizenship savings with helping St. Kitts reduce public debt below 60% of GDP and cushion the pandemic shock.
Following the popularity and boom of second passports—for the security and relocation possibilities they provided—post-pandemic, it was evident that citizenship had become an asset that countries could sell. But scale introduced fragility—and backlash.
The cost of the passport trade
The IMF’s January 2025 working paper found that citizenship-by-investment programmes raise annual real house price growth by 1.7–2.9 percentage points in countries that permit real estate investment, with effects persisting for over a decade. Yet outside small island states, the IMF found no significant boost to aggregate domestic investment or long-term public revenue. The programmes deliver cash quickly, yet they do not automatically deliver structural transformation.
They also attract scrutiny. In 2020, Cyprus shut its programme, which generated over €7 billion ($8.3 billion) in revenue, after an Al Jazeera investigation exposed passports issued to oligarchs and fugitives; 77 investors were later stripped of citizenship. In April 2025, the EU Court of Justice ruled Malta’s programme violated EU law, declaring that nationality “cannot be commercialised” because it confers Union citizenship. Malta was the last EU member state operating such a scheme.
The pressure cascaded. In June 2025, an internal US State Department memo flagged 36 countries, including five Caribbean citizenship jurisdictions, for potential travel restrictions. By January 2026, immigrant visa processing had been suspended for 75 countries, including 10 citizenship-by-investment states, such as Antigua and Barbuda.
For the Caribbean, the reckoning arrived in real time. After coordinated EU, UK, and US pressure, four Eastern Caribbean programmes signed a memorandum in 2024 raising minimum thresholds to $200,000 and above. A treaty also mandated a 30-day physical presence requirement within the first five years, a move that stripped nomads, foreign expatriates, and wealthy investors of the zero-residency model that defined the Caribbean golden passport industry for years.
St. Kitts provides the starkest case study of what reform costs. Revenue fell 60% in the first nine months of 2024 to $80.7 million after the country doubled its investment floor and tightened screening. The IMF projected that citizenship income would remain structurally lower and warned that the fiscal deficit would widen to 11% of GDP.
Diplomatically, golden passports caused a dilemma, especially for Caribbean countries that increasingly embraced them: tighten scrutiny standards to protect visa-free access to global hubs and shrink revenue. Or keep them loose and risk losing access altogether.
Vanuatu learned the hard way when the EU permanently revoked its visa-free privileges in December 2024, the first such action ever triggered explicitly by a citizenship programme.
The lessons from the multiple episodes in the soul-searching world of diplomatic relations and travel revealed one truth: passport value is not sovereign. It is relational and depends on whether other countries accept the standards that countries set.
Africa enters a closing market
Now, Africa is entering the investment migration industry at precisely this inflection point.
Egypt became the continent’s first formal citizenship-by-investment jurisdiction in 2019, requiring foreign investors to make a minimum $250,000 donation. Its passport offers 18 visa-free destinations and allows e-visa travel to about 41 other countries globally—far fewer than most Caribbean countries—but carries a strategic advantage: Egyptian citizens are eligible for the US E-2 Treaty Investor visa, a route to American residency through a qualifying business investment.
São Tomé and Príncipe launched its programme in August 2025 at $90,000, among the lowest globally. In its first four and a half months, it received 98 applications from 27 nationalities: Russians (22), Chinese (17), Germans (15), Indians (5), and Nigerians (4). The first passports were issued in January 2026.
Sierra Leone introduced a $140,000 fast-track scheme in January 2025. And Botswana is preparing an impact investment programme priced between $75,000 and $90,000, potentially among the world’s cheapest.
Nigeria is watching too. A citizenship-by-investment bill passed its second reading in the House of Representatives in March 2025, proposing a new citizenship class for foreign investors in agriculture, ICT, and renewable energy.
The bill requires a constitutional amendment and ratification by 24 state assemblies—a high bar—but the intent signals that Africa’s largest economy sees strategic value in the model.
The demand signal from Africans is already visible elsewhere. In 2023, Nigerians accounted for 33% of all applications to Antigua and Barbuda’s programme—the single largest nationality.
By H1 2024, that share had dropped to 9% as Chinese and American applicants surged, but the absolute numbers reflect a substantial African appetite for second passports.
Yet Africa faces a structural mobility gap. Caribbean citizenship delivers visa-free access to roughly 145 destinations. São Tomé’s passport offers 59. Botswana projects around 82. Nigeria, ranked 87th on the 2026 Henley Passport Index, offers just 44.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) provides free movement across 15 West African member states in a bid to ease intra-continental movement, but the African Union’s (AU) continental free movement protocol, adopted in 2018, has only four ratifications and remains far from the 15 needed to take effect.
If the product is travel freedom, Africa is selling a weaker version. And the continent’s own cautionary tale still looms: Comoros launched a citizenship scheme in 2008, issued 52,000 passports, lost an estimated $100 million to mismanagement, and saw its former president sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption tied to the programme. It has not reopened.
So why enter at all?
The nomad hedge
The answer lies partly in who is buying, and why.
Applications to investment migration programmes are becoming popular due to their permanence. In Q1 2025, Henley & Partners, a global citizenship advisory firm, reported that it processed 64% more applications, driven largely by Americans. Political uncertainty at home has made second citizenship a form of insurance. For high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and the growing class of location-independent workers, the appeal is no longer lifestyle but contingency.
More than 50 countries now offer dedicated digital nomad visas; several of those, even in Africa, were introduced after 2020. Africa is positioning itself as a destination: Kenya launched a nomad visa in 2024, South Africa introduced one spanning three months to three years, and cities like Cape Town, Nairobi, and Lagos are building the infrastructure of remote work.
But a nomad visa is not citizenship. It is a temporary permission tied to income thresholds. It does not confer voting rights, tax residency, or generational portability.
Citizenship-by-investment, by contrast, is permanent, inheritable, and in many Caribbean jurisdictions comes with no capital gains, wealth, or inheritance taxes.
Grenada offers a unique additional advantage: it is the only Caribbean programme whose citizens can access the US E-2 investor visa, making it a pathway to American residency for a fraction of the cost of a US green card.
For digital nomads, a visa opens a chapter. But a passport opens an exit.
Africa’s CBI programmes may not compete on mobility today. But if structured around productive investment—renewable energy, agriculture, technology—rather than speculative real estate, they could offer something the Caribbean model has struggled to deliver: long-term economic transformation alongside short-term capital.
The business of “belonging” and the stakes
Investment inflows from global CBI and residency-by-investment (RBI) programmes were estimated at least £21.4 billion ($25.4 billion), according to a report by the European Parliament. Africa is stepping in as Europe steps out and Washington scrutinises. The economics promise capital, but the geopolitics threaten constraint.
The Caribbean’s decade of data offers a clear lesson. Citizenship-by-investment can fund geothermal plants, reduce sovereign debt, and build climate-resilient housing. It can also inflate housing costs, create fiscal dependency, and, if oversight fails, destroy the very visa-free access that makes the passport worth buying.
For African states now entering this market, the test is whether they can learn from both the successes and the scandals. If citizenship is sold to finance national development, it must enhance the passport’s strength, not dilute it.
Otherwise, the business of belonging becomes a race to the bottom, where the short-term revenue of today erodes the travel freedom of tomorrow.
In the age of mobility as power, that is a risk no country can afford.
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