Open Letter to President Ruto: Lower the Class G Visa Barrier for Descendants of Enslaved Africans
His Excellency Dr. William Samoei Ruto President of the Republic of Kenya
Your Excellency,
We are writing to you publicly — not because we lack confidence in Kenya’s institutions, but because this issue belongs to every African and every descendant of enslaved Africans who has ever looked toward the continent and asked: Is there a place for me here?
The answer, as Kenya’s current Class G Investor Permit framework stands, is: only if you have $100,000 USD.
CRDEA is calling on your administration to change that.
The Policy as It Stands
Kenya’s Class G Investor Permit requires a minimum capital investment of USD $100,000 for foreign nationals seeking long-term residency through business establishment. For voluntary investors with accumulated wealth, institutional backing, or access to capital markets, this threshold is a reasonable barrier. It was designed to attract substantive economic actors — and it does.
But descendants of enslaved Africans are not ordinary voluntary investors.
They are the inheritors of a specific, documented, centuries-long dispossession — of land, of labour, of accumulated capital, of the very generational wealth-building mechanisms that most voluntary investors take for granted. To subject them to the same financial bar as a corporate investor from Singapore or a real estate developer from Dubai is not policy neutrality. It is the continuation of a historical injury by institutional indifference.
What We Are Asking
CRDEA is calling on the Government of Kenya to amend the Class G Investor Permit framework to include a verified Descendant of Enslaved Africans (DEA) classification, which would:
- Reduce the minimum capital investment threshold to USD $30,000 for applicants who provide documented evidence of descent from enslaved Africans
- Create a phased capital deployment pathway, with initial investment of $30,000 at entry and a structured timeline for further contribution as the business establishes itself
- Grant qualifying applicants access to existing SME, agri-business, and enterprise development infrastructure currently available to Kenyan investors
- Be administered through the Department of Immigration Services in coordination with the Kenya Diaspora Alliance and the State Department for Diaspora Affairs
This is not a request for charity. It is a request for proportionality.
Why Kenya, Why Now
Your Excellency’s administration has positioned Kenya as a continental leader in diaspora engagement. The State Department for Diaspora Affairs, the recognition of remittances as a critical economic pillar, Kenya’s active participation in African Union Agenda 2063 — these are not rhetorical gestures. They represent a genuine institutional architecture for diaspora inclusion.
But that architecture has a missing brick.
Ghana’s Joseph Project extended a symbolic and legal welcome to diaspora descendants, generating significant goodwill and inbound investment. Yet it stopped short of a durable residency pathway tied to accessible capital thresholds. Kenya has the opportunity to go further — to create not just a welcome, but a framework — one that acknowledges what was taken and builds a proportional pathway for return.
The African Union’s Agenda 2063 designates the diaspora as Africa’s Sixth Region. A tiered Class G threshold for descendants of enslaved Africans would be the most concrete policy expression of that designation Kenya has ever enacted.
The Economic Case
Descendants of enslaved Africans who seek to return are not speculative investors. They are motivated by identity, permanence, and community — not short-term arbitrage. Research consistently shows that diaspora investors hold longer-term business commitments, hire locally at higher rates, and reinvest proportionally more of their earnings in their host communities than foreign institutional investors.
At a $30,000 threshold, Kenya would attract a sustained pipeline of entrepreneurs in food manufacturing, agri-processing, hospitality, health services, and the creative economy — sectors where returning descendants are disproportionately concentrated.
The aggregate economic impact of bringing even a fraction of the estimated 40 million descendants of enslaved Africans into Kenya’s formal investor framework — at accessible capital levels — would be measurable, distributed, and lasting.
Our Position Is Clear
We are not asking Kenya to lower its standards. We are asking Kenya to apply a historically informed standard — one that accounts for the fact that the global wealth gap between voluntary investors and descendants of enslaved Africans did not emerge by accident. It was built, deliberately, over four hundred years.
The $100,000 threshold, applied without distinction, does not see that history. We are asking your administration to see it.
CRDEA is prepared to work with the relevant ministries, the Kenya Diaspora Alliance, and the Department of Immigration Services to develop the verification framework, the documentary evidence standards, and the policy language required to operationalize this proposal. We bring no political agenda beyond the straightforward proposition that the doors of the continent should be widest for those who were taken from it by force.
We look forward to a response — and to Kenya leading where others have only gestured.
Respectfully and publicly submitted,
The Coalition for the Repatriation of Descendants of Enslaved Africans (CRDEA) crdea.com
CRDEA is an advocacy organization advancing the legal, economic, and civic reintegration of the African diaspora. Our ADSII (African Diaspora Systemic Integration Initiative) framework provides governments with structured policy pathways for meaningful Right of Return implementation.