Djibouti document photos online

Squeezed onto Africa's strategic doorstep at the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, tiny Djibouti hosts more foreign military bases per square citizen than almost anywhere on Earth. The United States, China, France, Japan and Italy all run installations near the capital, and base-hosting agreements pour roughly 300 million US dollars a year into the treasury, around a tenth of GDP. China built its very first overseas military base here, and Japan opened its first foreign base ever on Djiboutian soil. For a nation of barely a million people whose passport opens few doors abroad, this single coastline has made it one of the most coveted addresses in global geopolitics.

• Passport power As of the 2025-2026 Henley Passport Index, the Djiboutian passport ranks around 87th, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to roughly 45 destinations worldwide.
• New passport Djibouti rolled out a redesigned national passport in 2022, modernising the document for a country whose population only just crossed one million in the 2024 census.
• Currency The Djiboutian franc has been welded to the US dollar at exactly 177.721 francs per dollar since 1973, one of the world's most stable and long-running fixed exchange rates.
• Currency board Djibouti runs a strict currency-board system: every franc in circulation must be fully backed by foreign-exchange reserves, a discipline it has kept for over three decades.
• Old money Before independence, several currencies circulated side by side in the territory, with rates pinned to the Indian rupee and even the silver Maria Theresa thaler, the famous trade coin of the Red Sea.
• Money origins Djibouti's banknotes are printed abroad by the Polish Security Printing Works, and the franc still nominally divides into 100 centimes that no longer circulate.
• Independence After a 1977 referendum backed independence by 99.8 percent, Djibouti became the last French colony on mainland Africa to gain sovereignty, on 27 June 1977.
• Citizenship That same 1977 settlement formally granted Djiboutian nationality to the country's ethnic Somali majority, resetting an identity balance that colonial-era votes had deliberately skewed toward the Afar minority.
• Record Lake Assal, 155 metres below sea level, is the lowest point in Africa and one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet.