In DV2015 Nigeria has been excluded from the lottery and this is going to change this dramatically for AF and will have impacts for the other regions. Why is it such a big deal that one country got excluded?? Well look at the numbers from 2013 entries:-

In my post about the draw process and explaining holes I shop that Nigeria  represented an enormous slice of the entries in DV2013 – a trend that surely continued in DV2014 and DV2015 (although we don’t have the numbers to prove that yet). Almost one third of all the entries across the whole of Africa (and 1/6 of the world) came from just one country – Nigeria. The draw process limits the selectees from any one country so the most profound impact of their exclusion will have been to remove all the wholes that Nigeria would normally generate. That impact would have increased the density to some extent at low number ranges (due to high fraud levels normally found in Nigerian entries) and then a big difference in the high CN ranges which would normally have been valid, but excluded Nigerian entries. So – a 2015AF50XXX number is effectively “higher” than 2014AF50XXX number.

 

The next impact has global impact. Nigeria would normally have secured around 3k visas issued. Those visas would have be (kind of) “returned” to the global availability pot. This is actually controlled by the quota formula, but what it means is there could be a few more visas available for other regions. Assuming those regions have the same density, response and success rates, that could mean high case numbers in some regions, not dramatic – but somewhat significant. The other AF countries also get a bit of a boost, which will help counteract the density point I made before, but still I think AF will struggle to reach the same cutoff as last year…