People in Kenya can now travel to the US in a more reasonable time frame

Visa wait time in the US embassy in Nairobi is down to 63 days from 365+ in July. 63 days is still too long but it’s a great improvement!

The embassy, under the new Ambassador Meg Whitman, has made some significant changes such as getting more people to perform interviews and waiving the interview requirement for people who already had visas in the past 4 years.

I doubt that my annoying emails to the embassy and state department contributed at all to this change.

I wrote an EA forum post sharing what I’ve learned from this, and giving an update on an an earlier post arguing (a bit naively) that it would be relatively easy to badger embassies into doing things.

As I say in the post, I’ve since learned that in this case at least, "not enough advocacy from Americans" was less of a limiting factor on visa interview wait times than "political capital within the embassy".