Burkina Faso document photos online

On January 29, 2025, Burkina Faso did something almost no country does anymore: it tore the regional logo off its own passport. After quitting the West African bloc ECOWAS alongside Mali and Niger, the three Sahel neighbours launched a shared biometric passport for their new confederation, the Alliance of Sahel States. The ECOWAS emblem that long sat on the green cover was dropped in favour of AES branding, and old booklets stay valid only until they expire. It is a rare modern case of a passport changing its political identity overnight, a vivid reminder that a travel document is also a statement of who a nation chooses to belong to.

• Passport In 2025 the Burkinabe passport switched allegiance, abandoning the ECOWAS logo for a new biometric design under the Alliance of Sahel States shared with Mali and Niger.
• Travel freedom The Burkinabe passport ranks 76th on the Henley Passport Index, opening just 56 destinations visa-free or visa-on-arrival, one of the world's more restricted travel documents.
• Identity card The new AES biometric ID card can be issued from age five, becomes legally mandatory at thirteen, stays valid ten years, and costs just 3,500 CFA francs.
• Currency Burkina Faso uses the West African CFA franc, fixed to the euro at exactly 655.957 francs per euro, a peg unchanged since the euro's birth and now slated to become the new 'Eco' currency.
• Banknotes Though it shares the CFA franc with seven neighbours, Burkina Faso has no central bank of its own, money is issued for all eight countries by the Central Bank of West African States.
• Name change The country only became 'Burkina Faso', meaning 'Land of Upright People', in 1984, when Thomas Sankara renamed colonial Upper Volta using words from two different local languages.
• Gold trade The medieval stone ruins of Loropeni, the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, guarded the trans-Saharan gold routes and are thought to be at least a thousand years old.
• Painted houses In the royal court of Tiebele, windowless mud houses are decorated only by women, who paint defensive symbols by hand in earth pigments passed from mother to daughter.
• Cinema Every two years Ouagadougou hosts FESPACO, founded in 1969 and the largest film festival on the African continent, devoted entirely to African and diaspora filmmakers.