Malawi’s visa reversal could backfire

Late last year, Malawi’s Finance Minister Joseph Mwanamvekha made an announcement in Parliament that risks unravelling years of economic strategy. 

“Visa-free access to Malawi is being revoked with immediate effect and a visa application fee will apply on a reciprocity basis,” he told legislators.

With that statement, travellers from 79 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, would face new barriers to entering the country.

The decision was a reversal of a policy introduced less than 10 months earlier. In February 2024, Malawi had lifted visa restrictions for those very nations, a landmark move that Mwanamvekha said at the time would “help Malawi become an attractive tourism destination and boost foreign currency flows”.

Former Tourism Minister Vera Kamtukule projected 1.1 million visitors in 2024, a strong rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic’s devastation when arrivals had plummeted by 80%.

The open door had begun to work. Now it was slamming shut again, not for geopolitical reasons, but for a far simpler and more desperate one: Malawi needed cash and it was running out of options.

By October 2024, the country’s foreign exchange reserves covered just 2.1 months of imports, well below the three-month minimum the government itself deems adequate. 

In 2023 the Reserve Bank of Malawi held $400 million in reserves, down from $600 million in 2020. The Malawi kwacha has depreciated sharply as a result, inflating import costs by some 20% for major retailers. Exports total just $1 billion annually against imports of $3 billion.

In 2024, the International Monetary Fund terminated Malawi’s extended credit facility early. Development partner funding, which had long propped up the budget, dropped by 43%, according to parliamentary opposition figures. 

Former President Lazarus Chakwera, seeking re-election last September, had already imposed austerity measures, suspending international travel for the cabinet, cutting fuel allowances and freezing recruitment. But the crisis deepened and Chakwera lost to Peter Mutharika. 

After the election, the new government began casting about for quick revenue wins and tourism offered one. By the tourism ministry’s own estimates, the visa-free policy had boosted arrivals and driven a roughly 20% rise in visitor spending during 2024. 

International visitor spending had jumped 19.7% to 40.8 billion Malawi kwacha. The tourism sector contributed an estimated 4.8% of GDP and was projected to bring $260 million in revenue by 2028.

The new finance minister however believed the government could extract more foreign currency by collecting visa fees instead of letting tourists in for free. Mwanamvekha announced that fees would be set on a reciprocity basis: travellers from countries that charged Malawians fees would pay equivalent rates to enter the country.

Current fees ranged from $50 for a seven-day transit visa to $75 for a single-entry 90-day pass. Under the reciprocal system, Americans and Britons would pay what Malawians were charged. Tour operators and industry associations who had spent months betting on the open-door policy were blindsided.

“Open countries attract more tourists due to the less red tape involved. This decision is going to make it hard to sell Malawi as a tourist destination considering that our immediate neighbours are open countries,” said Innocent Kaliati, the managing director of the Orbis Destination Management Company. 

Malawi’s regional competitors are moving in the opposite direction, with Rwanda, Benin and Seychelles earning maximum scores on the African Union’s Visa Openness Index by waiving visas for African travellers and offering streamlined digital access for others. 

Earlier in 2025, Kenya declared visa-free entry for all African nations and rolled out a digital electronic travel authorisation system for the rest of the world.

Namibia introduced reciprocal visas in April 2024 but allowed for visas-on-arrival, a crucial softener. Multi-country safari itineraries, the bedrock of Southern African tourism, typically bundle Malawi with South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. But longer visa lead times, higher costs and bureaucratic friction could now see operators and their clients skipping Malawi entirely. 

The policy risks reversing the gains of the past year, the Malawi Tourism Council’s executive director Memory Momba Kamthunzi warned. “The government wants visa fees for revenue generation purposes but open visa status increases the number of visitors, which in turn improves tourism income.”

When Namibia imposed reciprocal visas in 2024, critics warned of a collapse of tourism, but the government there accompanied the requirement with a visa-on-arrival system that allowed travellers to obtain visas easily upon landing. Research shows that visa-on-arrival and eVisa systems do not significantly deter tourism in the same way that pre-travel visa requirements do. 

The response to Kenya’s experimental electronic travel authorisation (ETA) system for all foreign visitors was mixed: initial confusion and frustration led to complaints from travellers accustomed to simpler entry, particularly from countries with which Kenya had bilateral visa waiver agreements. 

Tourism stakeholders feared backlash but in early 2025, the country declared visa-free entry for all African nations while retaining the eTA for non-African travellers. Kenya’s government recognised what Malawi’s did not: the method of enforcing visas matters as much as whether they are enforced at all.

A critical ambiguity still hangs over Malawi’s announcement. The tourism ministry’s spokesperson, Joseph Nkosi, clarified that the reciprocity proposal must still be tabled before Parliament and approved before it takes effect. Mwanamvekha announced it as “immediate effect”, yet the legal reality suggests otherwise. Parliament, not the executive, must codify the change. 

If lawmakers and tourism stakeholders can make a robust case that the policy, if implemented without visa-on-arrival or an expedited eVisa system, will cost more in lost tourism revenue than it gains in visa fees, they may yet compel a rethink.

Tourism operators are already lobbying for an electronic visa system with expedited processing at arrival, a lower economic rate for regional travellers and exemptions for multi-country safari bookings. These are not radical demands; they mirror Namibia’s model and the emerging African consensus on managed openness. 

What Malawi’s government has not articulated and perhaps does not fully grapple with, is that visa fees are a policy choice driven by desperation rather than strategy. The forex crisis predates the visa reversal by years. It will outlast it. 

Collecting $50 or $75 from each tourist visiting Malawi is a drop against the scale of the shortfall. The government also requires tourists to pay for accommodation and services in hard currency, another sign of how acute the squeeze has become. 

Companies must repatriate export earnings within 90 days instead of 120. Derivatives trading has been suspended. These are not the moves of a government calibrating policy but rather one in crisis triage.