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Working in Europe from Africa: 4 visas with no job offer

Visas8 min · 2026-09-23

Most advice on how to work in Europe from Africa starts with 'get a job offer with sponsorship'. That is the hard way round. Of the 5,787 English-language listings we track as of 17 September 2026, 452 mention visa sponsorship, and you are competing with the whole world for those. The easier way round is to arrive legally, with the right to stay and look, and then be the candidate who can start next month. Four countries built a permit for exactly that. One of them has just switched it off. This guide is the four, in numbers, and then the honest part: how many Nigerians and South Africans actually got a first permit in the EU last year, and for what.

Can you enter Europe to look for a job?

Yes, on three routes that are open today and one that is paused. Germany's Opportunity Card gives you up to twelve months and lets you work 20 hours a week while you search. Austria's job seeker visa gives you six months if you score 70 of 100 points. The Dutch orientation year gives recent graduates of top-200 universities twelve months with no restrictions on work. Portugal's job seeker visa was withdrawn on 23 October 2025 and its replacement is not yet open. The UK has nothing of the kind: the Skilled Worker visa requires a certificate of sponsorship from an approved employer before you apply.

Germany's Opportunity Card: six points and a blocked account

The Chancenkarte is the biggest door and the one most people searching for a job seeker visa for Germany actually want. Two ways in. If your degree or vocational qualification is fully recognised as equivalent in Germany, you get the card on proof of funds alone. If not, you need six points from the table on the German Embassy in Abuja's Opportunity Card page: 4 for a partial recognition of your qualification, 3 for German at B2, 2 for B1, 1 for A2, 1 for English at C1 or better, 3 for five years of relevant experience in the last seven, 2 for two years in the last five, 1 for a shortage occupation, 2 if you are 18 to 35, 1 if you are 35 to 40, 1 for six months of previous legal residence in Germany, and 1 for a qualifying spouse. A 27-year-old with a Nigerian or South African degree, five years of experience and C1 English is on six before learning a word of German.

The catch is the money. The embassy page asks for proof of 'a minimum amount of €1,091 for each month', which for a twelve-month card is about €13,092 in a blocked account before the visa is issued. Section 20a of the Residence Act sets the rest: the card is issued for up to one year, you may work an average of 20 hours a week, you may do trial employment of up to two weeks at a time, and once you have a job the follow-on card can run for up to two more years. Applications go through the Foreign Office's Consular Services Portal. Our Opportunity Card guide covers the conversion to a work permit once you are hired; the short version is that the card buys time, not a job. As of 17 September 2026, Germany is also where the most English-language listings in our database mention sponsorship: 98.

Austria's job seeker visa: 70 points, six months, then the Red-White-Red Card

Austria's route is for the 'very highly qualified', which in practice means a degree and a score. You need at least 70 of 100 points on the migration.gv.at criteria: a four-year degree is 20, a STEM degree 30, a PhD 40; being under 35 is 20, under 40 is 15, under 45 is 10; German or English at A2 is 10; work experience counts 1 point per half year. The visa is valid for six months to look for work, costs €195, and asks for health insurance covering all risks and 'proof of adequate means of subsistence' without naming a figure. Find a job that matches your qualification and you apply for the Red-White-Red Card, whose application fee is €218. A South African engineering graduate of 26 with two years of experience scores 30 for the degree, 20 for age, 10 for English and 4 for experience: 64, six short. A PhD or a few more years of experience closes it. Austria is a small market; go in with a target list, not a hope.

The Dutch orientation year: the cheapest ticket, if your university ranks

The orientation year for highly educated persons is the most generous of the four and the narrowest. You qualify if, within the last three years, you completed a master's or PhD at a foreign university in the top 200 of at least two of the three major rankings, or a bachelor's or master's at a Dutch institution. The IND page says the permit is valid for one year, that you may work freely and that your employer needs no work permit, and the fee is €254, the lowest of any route here. Check your university against the rankings for the year you graduated, because that is how the IND applies the test. The permit after it is the highly skilled migrant permit, which costs €423 to apply for and comes with a reduced salary threshold for orientation-year graduates; our Netherlands guide has this year's figures. South Africans already use this market more than any other: see the Eurostat section below.

Portugal: the visa that closed

Until last autumn Portugal had the simplest job seeker visa in Europe: 120 days, extendable by 60, work allowed, and proof of three times the minimum monthly wage. Law 61/2025 of 22 October changed article 57-A of the Foreigners Act, and the visa portal's notice says that from 23 October 2025 consular posts and VFS centres 'will not be able to accept applications for a job seeker visa'. What replaces it is a visa for qualified job seekers, for people with 'specialised technical skills', and the portal's page for it still reads, as of 17 September 2026, 'not yet available at Portuguese consular posts, awaiting the necessary regulation'. Do not pay anyone who says otherwise. Of the English-language ads we track in Portugal, 8 mention sponsorship, so the Portuguese listings are worth watching for the day the regulation lands, not before.

What Eurostat says about who actually gets in

Here is the honest part. EU countries issued about 3.9 million first residence permits to non-EU citizens in 2025, 10.1 % more than in 2024, and 33.6 % of them were for employment (Eurostat, Statistics Explained, 2025 data). Nigerian citizens received 32,039 of those permits. Only 3,961 were for employment; 13,092 were for family reasons, 6,219 for education and 8,767 for other reasons (Eurostat, migr_resfirst, updated 11 September 2026). Germany issued the most to Nigerians, 7,812, but just 530 of them for work. Italy was second at 7,205 with 297 for work. Of the large markets, the one that gave Nigerians the most employment permits was Portugal, 657, under the visa that has just closed.

South Africans are a different story, and a better one. The EU issued 9,529 first permits to South African citizens in 2025, and 3,482 of them, more than a third, were for employment. The Netherlands alone issued 3,459 permits to South Africans, 1,218 for work, which is more than Germany, Ireland, France and Spain put together for that purpose. Ireland was second at 1,120 permits, 522 for work, and Germany third at 999, with 366 for work. For comparison, Moroccan citizens received 202,054 permits, the third-largest group of any nationality, and 42,273 of those were for employment. If you are asking where jobs for South Africans overseas actually turn into permits, the answer in the data is Amsterdam, then Dublin, then Berlin.

Which of our markets actually mention sponsorship

Of the 29,410 listings we track as of 17 September 2026, 5,787 have the ad written in English, and 452 of those say something about visa sponsorship. By country: Germany 98, Spain 84, Italy 74, United Kingdom 65, France 40, Switzerland 22, Netherlands 11 and Portugal 8. Two things stand out. First, Spain and Italy, second and third for sponsorship mentions, have no job search visa at all, and the Netherlands, with the best employment figures for South Africans, has almost none: Dutch employers who sponsor do it through the recognised-sponsor register, not in the ad. Second, 452 is about 1.5 % of everything we list. Waiting for one of those ads is a plan; arriving on one of the permits above and applying to the other 98.5 % is a better one. Browse the English-language listings that mention sponsorship, or go straight to Germany and the Netherlands.

What nobody mentions

First, the money is the filter, not the points. €13,092 sitting idle in a blocked account is the real entry test for the German card, and a sponsor's letter does not replace it. Austria and the Netherlands publish no figure, which means the consulate decides, so bring bank statements that would satisfy a sceptic. Second, a search permit is not a work permit. Every route above ends with a second application, a Red-White-Red Card, a highly skilled migrant permit, a German work permit, each with its own salary threshold and queue. Third, appointments. The German application is online, but the identity check is still in person at the embassy or a service provider, and the wait for that slot is part of the timeline. Start the paperwork before the job search, not after.

Workcamino cannot get you the visa. What it does is show every listing in Europe that is open today, in English where the ad is in English, with the sponsorship line read out of the ad itself, so a year on an Opportunity Card is spent on real jobs rather than dead ones. Pick the route your points and your savings allow, read the official page twice, and go. Buen camino.

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