São Tomé and Príncipe's First Year Report: 548 Applications, 29 Passports

The headline numbers

Read plainly, the approval rate is high and the rejection rate low: of the 362 files decided, 97% were approved. That says less about the programme being lenient and more about the pre-screening licensed agents are required to do before a file ever reaches the Unit; a rejected application is, in practice, one that should never have been submitted.

The gap between approval and passport

The number worth sitting with is the distance between 350 approvals and 29 passports. The CIU addresses this directly in the report rather than burying it: it states plainly that document issuance "has not progressed at the same pace as application approvals," and names its remedy as streamlined post-approval procedures, tighter inter-institutional coordination, and an expanded office in São Tomé itself.

That's a candid admission for a one-year-old government programme to publish in writing, and it's worth taking at face value rather than reading past it. Every approval under this programme produces four separate government documents (a birth registry entry, a national identity card, a citizenship certificate, and a passport), each processed by a different department. One error in any of the three departments involved sends the file back to the start. A young unit scaling from zero to 548 applications inside twelve months was always going to hit friction somewhere in that chain; the report shows it landing at the document stage, not the approval stage.

For an applicant, the practical read is this: budget four months from approval to passport in hand, not the six weeks some marketing suggests. Two months to approval is realistic and matches what we see in our own pipeline. The Unit has stated capacity expansion is already underway.

Where the applicants come from

China, Russia and Iran together account for roughly 60% of the year's applications, a concentration that makes sense once you look at what the programme doesn't restrict.

Source: São Tomé and Príncipe Citizenship by Investment Unit, First Year Report, 1 September 2026.

The pattern is a direct consequence of policy elsewhere. All five Caribbean CBI programmes closed to Russian and Belarusian applicants under commitments made to the US Treasury. Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Lucia exclude Iranian nationals outright, and Dominica suspended new Iranian applications in March 2026. São Tomé and Príncipe accept every nationality except North Korean, and stateless applicants, ten of them in year one, can apply as a category in their own right. For a large segment of the market, this isn't the cheapest option by coincidence; it's one of the only options at any price.

Germany's presence at fourth place, 28 applications from an EU nation with full freedom of movement, is the one figure that doesn't fit a "restricted nationality" explanation. That's a diversification decision rather than a mobility one, and it's consistent with what we hear directly from German clients: a low-cost, neutral second citizenship held in reserve, unrelated to travel.

Who is actually applying: family structure

Source: São Tomé and Príncipe Citizenship by Investment Unit, First Year Report, 1 September 2026.

Families of three and four made up the largest family-sized cohort at a combined 35% of all applications, unsurprising given the programme's pricing ladder, where a principal applicant with up to three dependents pays only USD 5,000 more than applying alone.

Where the money is going

Roughly half of the 350 approved applications had completed their qualifying contribution payment by 1 September, generating just over USD 9.8 million for the National Transformation Fund, a fund the government describes as financing infrastructure and public-sector projects tied to the country's development priorities, rather than sitting as general revenue.

In its first year, the Fund financed the installation of new power generators to strengthen national electricity capacity, and IT equipment upgrades across government ministries. The Unit has named five areas for its next phase of investment: continued energy infrastructure, water quality and supply, wastewater systems, waste management, and further digitalisation of public services.

For an applicant, this matters beyond optics. A donation-funded programme with a visible, published spending record is a harder programme to shut down or discredit than one that can't show where the money went, and it's one of the few CBI reports in the sector that names specific completed projects rather than describing the fund only in the abstract.

A year of firsts

Source: São Tomé and Príncipe Citizenship by Investment Unit, First Year Report, 1 September 2026.

The January 2026 amendment is easy to skim past but matters operationally: it's what makes the programme genuinely remote end-to-end, removing the need for an applicant to be physically present for any stage, including document collection.

What this report gets right, and what it leaves out

Publishing granular, government-sourced figures this early in a programme's life is unusual, and it's a point in the CIU's favour that the numbers are specific enough to be checked rather than rounded into marketing language. The rejection rate, the payment-completion rate, the exact nationality breakdown: none of that is required disclosure, and most comparable programmes at this age don't publish it.

Two things from our own pipeline aren't addressed in the report at all. In April 2026, the CIU placed a hold on applications from anyone already holding three or more foreign nationalities, citing Nationality Law No. 07/2022, and the same memorandum paused passport issuance for adult dependents pending a revised dependency framework. Neither appears in the First Year Report. Both are worth confirming with a licensed agent before you apply if either could apply to you or your dependents, since a hold like this is exactly the kind of detail that isn't visible until someone checks on your behalf.

The takeaway

A programme that took in 548 applications and approved 350 of them in its first year, while publishing the numbers that show where it's still catching up, is behaving like one built to last rather than one built to extract a first cohort of fees and move on. The approval-to-passport gap is real, the CIU has said so itself, and four months is the number to plan around rather than six weeks. Everything else in the report, the rejection rate, the nationality spread, the USD 9.8 million already at work, points toward a programme scaling roughly as fast as its institutions can absorb it.

For the full breakdown of costs, eligibility and the CPLP route this citizenship unlocks toward Portugal and Brazil, see our complete São Tomé cost and eligibility guide.

Lincoln Global Partners FZCO holds Marketing Agent Licence No. STP-2025-8, issued under Decree-Law No. 07/2025. Figures in this article are drawn from the Citizenship by Investment Unit's First Year Report, 1 September 2026, received directly by Lincoln Global Partners as a licensed agent.