Countries count cost of Trump's travel bans and taxes

When Essi Farida Geraldo, a Lomé-based architect, heard about partial restrictions on travel to the US from Togo as part of the travel bans announced by Donald Trump last Thursday, she lamented losing access to what many young Togolese consider to be a land of better opportunities.

- By Eromo Egbejule and Carlos Mureithi NAIROBI

"The United States was the Togolese's El Dorado," Geraldo said. "Many people go to work in the US to save money and support their families or projects in Africa."

Trump's order, which came into effect this week, prohibits people from seven African countries - Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia and Sudan - from entering the US, making Africa the worst-affected continent. People from another three African countries - Burundi, Sierra Leone and Togo - will be subject to partial restrictions, meaning they will not be able to travel to the US on certain visas.

For Geraldo, an alumna of the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders programme instituted by the Obama administration, the new restrictions compound the harm from Trump's foreign aid cuts, which made it harder for her to access funding for social projects in the tiny west African state. Mikhail Nyamweya, a political and foreign affairs analyst, said the new travel bans and restrictions would "bring about a pattern of exclusion" and "may also institutionalise a perception of Africans as outsiders in the global order".