OLLO – Acceptance and Refusal Rates of Students from Africa vs. International Students – May 16, 2022
The Department is committed to a fair and non-discriminatory application of immigration procedures. All applications from around the world are assessed equally against the same criteria.
Volumes of temporary resident visa and study permit applications from Africa have significantly grown within the last decade; intake tripled from 2016 to 2019 across the top eight source countries in Africa, with the number of refusals generally increasing in relative proportion.
In lower income countries, there is more incentive for people to want to migrate to other countries where they may have better opportunities. The data demonstrates that this has led to high proportions of non-genuine study permit applications.
Extensive networks of ghost consultants in several countries have also exacerbated this situation, including by misleading otherwise genuine applicants and leading to a proliferation of fraudulent documents.
A mandatory training session on unconscious bias was taken by all staff in 2020. The Department also developed and implemented a culture training including case studies which is mandatory for all decision-makers prior to working on Africa caseloads.
IRCC will continue the expansion of digitization, which will allow for more remote work sharing of caseloads, ensuring processing times in Africa come into line with global processing times.
IRCC maintains quality assurance measures to achieve consistency in decision-making on these applications. Additionally, the Department continues to analyze data, refine criteria, and design tools to improve decision making and ensure that genuine admissible students are able to study in Canada.
Approval rate for study permits (African countries vs others) and per official language
