Official Schengen Visa Application Figures in Nigeria drops

Wed, Aug 8, 2018 | By publisher


Politics

THE official Schengen visa application statistics, released by SchengenVisaInfo.com, has revealed a drop of 5.7% in Nigeria applications between 2016 and 2017.

In 2017, 83,467 Nigerians filed a Schengen visa application at one of the consulates located either in Lagos or Abuja. On a global scale, applications in Nigeria weighted to one percent of the total. Knowing that there are Schengen visa applications in every country of the world such contribution can be considered really good for a country like Nigeria. However, in comparison with the year before a drop in the number of applications is noted.

In 2016, 88,714 Nigerians were pursuing a Schengen visa and similar to last year they shared one percent of the total applications worldwide. It turns out that in 2017 the number of these applications dropped by 5.7%, at 83,467.

Italy and France have changed their positions as the top favorite traveling destination for Nigerians, regarding the statistics. In 2017, 21,754 out of 83,467 uniform Schengen visa applicants in the African country were aiming to visit France. Italy, on the other hand, was the objective of 12,590 applicants.  The year before, the number of uniform visa applications at the Italian and French embassies located in Nigeria stood as below

Nigeria 2017 Schengen visa
Nigeria 2017 Schengen visa

French consulate located in the capital Lagos, in 2017 granted 9,962 Schengen uniform visas, including here 2,932 visas or 29.4% of the total grants being MEV visas. Despite having the highest number of visa issuance, this embassy wasn’t really too generous. As seen from the statistics, 11,079 applicants at French consulate were not given a Schengen a visa. In percentage terms, uniform not-issued visas shared slightly more than half (50.9%) of total visa applications in 2017 recorded at the French embassy. To really understand how high is this number let us recall that the German embassy during that time has received 11,142 Schengen uniform visa applications.

Italian consulate located in the capital Lagos too granted 3,960 Schengen uniform visas to Nigerian applicants in 2017. On the other hand, they rejected 8,522 such applications or 67.7% of the total applications, one of the highest rejection rate among all Schengen consulates in this country.

The other Italian and Spanish consulates in Abuja had the lightest load of Schengen visa applications during 2017; 174 applications registered in Italian embassy and 141 at the Spanish one.

– Aug. 8, 2018 @ 14:35 GMT |

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