France: Int’l Students Can Now Apply Online for Residence Permits

France’s Ministry of Interior has announced it is opening an online service through which international students can apply for residence permits from home, without having to make an appointment or show at the prefecture offices.

According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Interior, the online application service, called ANEF-séjour (Digital Administration for Internationals in France) aims to facilitate international students’ procedures while applying for French residence permits, whether it be the renewal of residence permit or obtaining the first permit after a visa, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

“The process of dematerializing student requests, which involves 120,000 procedures each year, will then be gradually extended by 2022 to other residence permits, i.e. a total of 870,000 permits and documents granted,” the press release reads.

On their online account, students can check the status of their application, respond to any requests for additional information, and find out the decision taken on their application.

Among others, the ministry states that students should appear physically only when the residence permit is ready to be collected.

The digitalization of residence permit applications would contribute to the following:

• Solving access difficulties, in particular, the appointments for applications submission

• Processing requests for residence permit issuance more rapidly

• Modernizing prefectures’ work tools

• Decreasing the number of visits at prefectures

Students can submit their applications through computers, tablets or smartphones, and users do not have to provide the same information several times. For instance, if the fingerprints were collected at the visa application consulate, it is not necessary to provide them again at the prefecture.

The implementation of the ANEF program commenced in December 2015 with the commissioning of an information system beneficial for prefectural officers working with asylum applications. Afterwards, it continued in February 2019, with the opening of a VLS-TS online validation teleservice, which is a long-stay visa used as a residence permit.

The service today aims to benefit international students, and it is estimated that the whole dematerialization of all requests for residence permits and for French nationality will be completed by the end of 2022.

In the framework of the “Bienvenue en France” plan, which was set up by the government in 2018, the service also aims to contribute to attracting international students in the country.

According to Campus France data, during the 2018/19 academic year, a total of 358,005 international students pursued higher studies in France. In this academic year, international students came from 196 countries of the world, 46 per cent of them from Africa.