Mali

Visa speed

Neither the Act nor the decree sets a processing standard, and that is visible from how both are built: the Act's 27 articles and the decree's 74 were read in full, and deadlines are scattered through them in many places — but every single one is addressed to the foreigner or the carrier, never to the authority. What is fixed for the foreigner: an entry visa of 90 days with one renewal; entry within three months on a consular visa, or one month on a visa from the immigration service; a temporary residence authorisation to be obtained once three months have passed since entry; the resident-card application to be lodged within 15 days of entry; an immigrant child's own application within 15 days of turning 18; the repatriation deposit to be paid within 15 days of arrival; on a change of residence, the card to be endorsed BEFORE departure and the same formality repeated within 48 HOURS of arriving at the new address (Art. 35 of the decree); an application to recover the deposit on final departure to be lodged 21 days before the departure date, with the release given no later than 8 days before. What is fixed for the carrier: a foreigner who fails the entry conditions must be taken away without delay at the border control's request, with the costs of their upkeep and return fare borne by the carrier (Arts. 18–22 of the decree). The only deadline attached to a decision of the authority is the one the Minister of Internal Security sets in the expulsion order itself; it runs from the date the order is served (Art. 38 of the decree).

Visa types: The Act divides foreigners into two categories, and everything else follows from that. NON-immigrants (Art. 6): passengers in transit; crew members of aircraft on a stopover; tourists and other visitors; officials, people on mission and their families and dependants; those coming to pursue a professional activity TEMPORARILY; and students. IMMIGRANTS (Art. 7) are those who come intending to establish their residence in Mali or to pursue a gainful activity or profession there PERMANENTLY. Excluded from the Act altogether are diplomats, international civil servants, foreigners of Malian origin under Law 95-070, and refugees. · The entry visa is valid for no more than 90 days from issue and is renewable ONLY ONCE (Art. 11 of the Act, Art. 7 of the decree). It confers no right of residence or establishment by itself. There is a use-it-or-lose-it limit too: entry must take place within three months where a consulate issued the visa, and within one month where the immigration service did (Art. 8 of the decree). · Multiple-entry visa — from SIX MONTHS to A YEAR, renewable. It is granted to someone whose activity requires periodic contact with public bodies, para-public organisations, professional chambers, travel and accommodation organisers or local authorities; the application must be supported by a certificate from their correspondent in Mali attesting to the frequency of that contact (Arts. 14–16 of the decree). The first entry must take place within three months of issue, or the visa is void. · Transit visa — a special authorisation in place of an entry visa: for a breakdown of the means of transport, a wait for a connection, or a stop in Mali for a tourist or family visit. In that last case the stay must not exceed 15 DAYS, and if continuing the journey proves impossible, a residence authorisation must be sought from the competent authority before that period runs out (Art. 11 of the decree). · What a non-immigrant needs to enter (Art. 2 of the decree): a valid passport or equivalent travel document, an entry visa (unless exempt), a RETURN TICKET or a ticket for onward travel, and the international vaccination certificates required by health regulations. To which the Act (Art. 8) adds documents on the purpose and conditions of the stay, on means of subsistence and repatriation guarantees, and — where the person intends to work — the documents needed for the professional activity. · Exemption from the requirements on means and repatriation guarantees (Art. 10 of the Act) applies in three cases: a foreigner joining a spouse lawfully admitted to reside in Mali; minors under 18 joining a father, mother or legal guardian lawfully admitted to reside there; and persons who, in the authorities' view, are capable by their abilities or talents of rendering important services to Mali. · A temporary residence authorisation (autorisation de séjour temporaire) is obligatory for everyone over 18 once THREE MONTHS have passed since entry (Art. 12 of the Act). For a non-immigrant it yields a residence visa (visa de séjour) valid for no more than a year from issue, renewable. An application for a stay of six months or longer is lodged AFTER entry, with the immigration service, together with a passport, a criminal-record extract no older than three months, and a medical certificate no older than TWO months from a doctor accredited in the country of departure, attesting that the applicant has no contagious disease and no infirmity rendering them unfit for the intended activity (Art. 23 of the decree). · A residence visa is issued only to someone who proves they can live on their own resources and undertakes to pursue no activity requiring authorisation (Art. 25 of the decree). The receipt for a lodged application does NOT by itself regularise the conditions of entry — the sole exception is for recognised refugees (Art. 12 of the Act). · Carte de résident — the establishment document, obtained by an immigrant foreigner. Valid FIVE YEARS from issue, renewable (Art. 16 of the Act). The application is made on stamped paper WITHIN 15 DAYS of the date of entry (Art. 31 of the decree) — meaning the decision on whether you are an immigrant must be taken at once, not as circumstances develop. The child of an immigrant foreigner applies for their own card within 15 days of turning 18, with a document set of their own that includes a repatriation guarantee (Art. 34 of the decree). · Salaried work is not permitted without authorisation under the legislation in force (Art. 17 of the Act). Someone coming to establish themselves for salaried work attaches to their file an employment contract endorsed by the National Labour Directorate (Art. 28 of the decree). Liberal, commercial, industrial and artisanal professions require the PRIOR authorisation of the responsible minister SEPARATELY — even for a foreigner already lawfully established (Art. 30 of the decree). Someone not working at all substantiates their means of subsistence and produces a medical certificate from a doctor who is both accredited and RESIDENT IN MALI (Art. 29 of the decree). · The repatriation guarantee runs through everything, and it applies even to nationals of countries with which Mali has agreements on the movement of persons (Art. 42 of the decree). Anyone arriving without a return ticket or a ticket to a destination outside Mali must lodge a repatriation deposit or hold a guaranteeing document: either a certificate from a state-approved bank guaranteeing their repatriation, or a decision approving a surety. The deposit equals the price of a ticket from the place of embarkation to the place of arrival in the most economical class of the transport used to reach Mali; it is paid into the Treasury against a receipt within 15 DAYS of arrival (Arts. 43, 45). Exempt are holders of diplomatic and service passports with their families; officials and military personnel carrying travel orders; nationals of countries BORDERING Mali, provided they travel by land; tourists using their own vehicles; and pupils and students duly enrolled in Malian educational institutions (Art. 44).

Collected on 8 August 2026 from Law No. 04-058 of 25 November 2004 on the conditions of entry, residence and establishment of foreigners, and from Decree No. 05-322/P-RM of 19 July 2005 implementing it. How they were found is a story of its own. The previous session stopped at the finding that the search on the Secretariat General of the Government's site (`sgg-mali.ml`) works by POST and that "a session token seems to be needed". No token is needed: a COOKIE JAR suffices. An ordinary POST with `-c`/`-b` to /fr/textes-officiels/recherche.html carrying the `field_titre` field returns 27 results, among them both the Act and its decree. The form is called `form_filter_client` — the same one Guinea uses, except that there it accepts GET and here only POST. The texts themselves are not separate files but whole GAZETTE ISSUES: the Act in JO 2005-01, the decree in JO 2005-28, 40 pages each. They do have a text layer, but pdftotext turns the diacritics into replacement characters under every encoding; extraction through PyMuPDF (`page.get_text()`) returns the French correctly. Worth remembering: a missing text layer and a corrupted one are different ailments with different cures. On work: the right to salaried employment comes not from the visa but from a separate authorisation under labour law, and the employment contract is endorsed by the National Labour Directorate. Liberal, commercial, industrial and artisanal professions require the prior authorisation of the responsible minister SEPARATELY — even for someone already lawfully established. The penalties are severe: gainful activity without a residence authorisation draws 3 months to 3 years' imprisonment and a fine of 200,000–500,000 CFA francs, and the employer is prosecuted as an accomplice if they themselves received notice that their employee's authorisation had been annulled (Art. 20 of the Act). Not one ground has a price, and that is an established fact. For visas the decree refers to the General Tax Code (Arts. 13, 17, 27); for the resident card, to a joint order of the ministers of finance and internal security (Art. 33), which is also where the features of the card itself are referred (Art. 32). The order is not in the gazette. The Code is there but of little use: issue JO 2007-05, which published Law No. 06-067 of 29 December 2006, prints only its opening, and the Code has since been amended by at least five acts — Laws 2018-009 and 2023-048, Ordinances 2025-006 and 2025-015, and the Laws 2025-024 and 2025-025 that ratified them. We have not recorded a rate from a version known to be out of date. The repatriation deposit is the largest sum in the whole procedure, and it is not fixed: it EQUALS the price of a ticket from the place of embarkation to the place of arrival in the cheapest class of the transport the person travelled by (Art. 45 of the decree). It is paid into the treasury against a receipt within fifteen days of arrival and refunded on final departure, on acquiring Malian nationality, and on passing into an exempt category (Art. 66). The refund request on final departure is filed twenty-one days before the date of travel, and the release of the sum comes no earlier than eight days before departure (Arts. 68, 70). A company that permanently employs at least 130 people and proves a sound financial position can obtain a GENERAL exemption from the deposit for its foreign employees, valid five years (Arts. 47, 53). A guarantor may be an owner of immovable or movable property or of a business, unencumbered by mortgage or pledge and worth at least five million francs, and no one may stand surety for more than four people apart from their own minor descendants (Arts. 54, 58). Who is outside the Act altogether. Article 4 excludes diplomatic and consular agents, international civil servants, foreigners of Malian origin under Nationality Law No. 95-070, and persons with REFUGEE status. There are therefore no refugee grounds in this collection: their procedure sits in another act, which this pass did not go looking for. The only trace of refugees in the Act itself is the proviso in Article 12: the receipt for a temporary-residence application does not regularise a person's position, EXCEPT where refugee status has been recognised. No ground has a processing standard, and the periods the acts do name are periods for the APPLICANT, not for the authority: three months from entry to obtain the temporary residence authorisation; fifteen days from the date of entry to apply for the resident card; fifteen days after turning eighteen for a grown child; three months for the first entry on a multiple-entry visa; forty-eight hours to have the card endorsed at a new place of residence. How long the answer takes is stated nowhere, so all ten grounds carry `processingUnpublished`.

Permanent residence after

no permanent status exists

Absence limits: A foreigner's residence visa or resident card becomes void — «caduc» — once they have left Malian territory for MORE THAN SIX CONSECUTIVE MONTHS (Art. 37 of the decree). Separately: on changing residence within the country, the resident card is endorsed by the competent administrative authority BEFORE departure, and the same formality is repeated within 48 hours of arriving at the new address (Art. 35 of the decree).

Malian law provides for no permanent status, and this was read in both instruments rather than inferred from their being unavailable. The section of the Act headed «DE L'ETABLISSEMENT» — on establishment, that is on settled standing itself — runs to just three articles (16–18), and its maximum is a single thing: a carte de résident valid FIVE YEARS from issue, renewable. A category that stops expiring does not exist in the Act. Nor is the status earned by time. The resident card goes to an IMMIGRANT foreigner, that is to someone who under Article 7 came intending to establish their residence in Mali or to pursue a gainful activity permanently — and the application for it is lodged within 15 days of the date of entry (Art. 31 of the decree). The card is thus granted not for years lived but on the intention declared at entry; there are no waiting years in the Act, but neither is there a status for them to lead to. One further feature separates the resident card from a permanent status: it VANISHES OF ITS OWN ACCORD on a long absence — anyone away for more than six consecutive months loses both the residence visa and the card (Art. 37 of the decree). The conditions for citizenship lie in the Malian Nationality Code (Law No. 95-070 of 25 August 1995, which the foreigners' Act cites in Article 4); it was not read on this pass, so the naturalisation fields are empty.

Document certification

consular legalisation

The country does not accept apostilles: documents go through consular legalisation in three steps — ministry of justice, foreign ministry, consulate.

Limit

no limit

Quarantine

no

Antibody titre test

not needed

The requirements are read from the bilateral form "Veterinary Health Certificate for Export of Dogs and Cats from the United States of America to the Republic of Mali". The veterinarian attests to the presence of a microchip if one is listed in the schedule of animals (so microchipping is desirable but not required); to a clinical examination on the date of issue showing no signs of infectious or contagious disease, including rabies; to the animal having originated in an area not under quarantine for rabies and not having been exposed to rabies; and to a current rabies vaccination stating the date, vaccine name, batch number and end date of the period of validity. The certificate is valid for thirty days from the date of issue. The form provides for no antibody titration at all and imposes no quarantine on arrival. Other vaccinations and treatments sit in an optional section. It sets no minimum interval between vaccination and travel, so the field is left empty. A caveat about the form itself: its attestations are word-for-word identical to the forms for Burkina Faso and Guinea, which makes this a generic APHIS template rather than a separately negotiated bilateral document. It shows the minimum the receiving side has agreed to accept, but it does not replace the Republic of Mali's own national rules where those are more detailed. The source is a bilateral veterinary certificate that the U.S. authority (APHIS) publishes as the form the receiving side accepts; the requirements are read from its mandatory fields and attestations. This describes import FROM the United States: the values (vaccination intervals, certificate validity) are set by the receiving side and do not depend on the country of departure, while the procedural part — accreditation of the veterinarian with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and endorsement by APHIS — is replaced by the equivalent of whatever country the animal leaves from. Read on 06.08.2026.

Life expectancy

60.7 years

Bread, 500 g

$ 0,64

Milk, 1 l

$ 1,17

Eggs, 12

$ 1,49

Chicken breast, 1 kg

$ 4,25

Cheese, 1 kg

$ 6,94

Rice, 1 kg

$ 1,10

Potatoes, 1 kg

$ 0,88

Apples, 1 kg

$ 2,31

Coca-Cola / Pepsi, 2 l

$ 1,07

Total

$ 19,9

The same set for every country, so the comparison is fair.

Rent, 1 bedroom

$ 252 a month

Rent, 3 bedrooms

$ 648 a month

Utility bills

$ 61,1 a month

Home internet

$ 22,4 a month

Monthly transport pass

$ 12,2 a month

Single transport ticket

$ 0,28

Petrol, litre

$ 0,98

Cold medicine

$ 3,07 for a week

Country averages. City prices, where collected, are shown above and are more precise.

Life expectancy

60,7 years2024

Road deaths

20,2 per 100k2021

Unemployment

2,8 %2025

Unemployment, ages 15–24

3,9 %2025

Inequality (Gini)

35,72021 · data lags behind

Health spending per person

$ 34,0 a year

Air pollution, PM2.5

35,5 µg/m³2023

Access to clean water

86,4 %2024

Governance

Political stability

low · -2,5

Control of corruption

below average · -1

Rule of law

low · -1,1

Government effectiveness

low · -1,3

World Bank estimates on a −2.5 to +2.5 scale, higher is better.

Natural hazards

Earthquakes

0,1 out of 10

River floods

7,9 out of 10

Coastal floods

0 out of 10

Tropical cyclones

0 out of 10

Droughts

7,4 out of 10

Tsunamis

0 out of 10

Each value carries the year it refers to. “Data lags behind” means this country's figure was collected noticeably earlier than the rest. Natural hazards use one 0–10 scale and are meant to be compared against each other.

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