“Kenya’s passport has dropped 52 places, from 68th in the world to 120th” That is the claim going round this week, and it is wrong. The 68th and the 120th readings come from two separate rankings, run by different people, that turn the same passport’s status into two different numbers.

That 120th rank was published on 15 September 2026 by a site called passportreports.com, which also gives Kenya a mobility score of 75. That score is the number of destinations a Kenyan can enter without arranging a visa first.

The 68th ranking is older and from somewhere else: it is Kenya’s place in the Henley Passport Index back in January, when the count was 69 destinations.

Henley updates every month, and its table today has Kenya at 69th with 70 destinations. So on the index that produced the 68, Kenya gained a destination this year and slipped exactly one place, because other countries gained faster. One place, not 52.

Think of two teachers ranking the same 199 pupils. One lets every pupil who scored the same share a position, so a dozen of them are all 69th. The other breaks every tie, so no two pupils share a number and the same child lands at 120th. Nothing about the child changed.

Henley measures its 199 passports against 227 destinations and lets passports share a rank. Kenya, Indonesia and Malawi all sit at 69th because all three reach 70 destinations. Collapsing ties that way squeezes 199 passports into 105 rank numbers, so the list bottoms out at 105th, where Afghanistan sits with 22 destinations.

passportreports.com scores the same 199 on visa-free entry plus visa on arrival plus electronic travel authorisation, then breaks ties on the visa-free count, so almost every passport gets its own number and the list runs to 187th.

That is how a 69th on one list and a 120th on the other describe the same passport. The fair comparison is to count rows: 124 passports sit above Kenya on Henley’s table, 129 above it on passportreports.com. With that, neither shows a 52-place drop.

passportreports.com does publish a year-by-year table for Kenya. It claims 113th in 2024, 109th in 2025 and 120th now, with the score sliding from 79 to 75. But that history could be made up. The domain was registered on 5th June 2026, three months ago. We don’t know the site owners, company, editor or whaever. The site itself warns that it may contain inaccuracies.

passportreports.com also ranks Kenya second of 199 countries for openness, behind Micronesia. That is the reverse measure: how many passports Kenya lets in.

Kenya scrapped visas for every nationality in January 2024 and put an eTA in their place, which we explained when it launched. In January 2025 the Cabinet dropped eTA pre-approval for African travellers, and in July 2025 that became visa-free entry for African and Caribbean citizens, 60 days at a time, with Somalia and Libya left out.

That mobility score of 75 breaks down as 37 destinations that ask for no visa at all, 33 that issue one on arrival, and 5 that take an eTA, the online permit you apply for before you fly. The other 123 want an application filed in advance, whether that is an eVisa or an embassy appointment. Most of what is left is regional. Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan are visa-free, as are ten Caribbean states from the Bahamas to Trinidad and Tobago.

Nobody has returned the favour. Of the 75 destinations a Kenyan can reach without arranging a visa first, exactly one is in Europe: Russia, on arrival. All 27 European Union members are on the visa-required list, as are the UK, the US, Canada, China, Japan, Australia and the UAE. Kenya is 10th of Africa’s 54 passports, behind Seychelles, Mauritius, South Africa, Botswana, Morocco, Lesotho, Namibia, Eswatini and Malawi.

If you follow the destination count, Kenya’s went up by one on Henley this year and its rank still slipped. Which tells you the rank moves mostly on what other countries do. The 123 destinations that still want a visa in advance are the list worth watching.