Buy a villa in the UAE - and get an Antiguan passport

Ajman, United Arab Emirates - "Buy villa in UAE, get family citizenship in Antigua & Barbuda," the advertisements scream.

It may seem a strange proposition, but for the majority of the United Arab Emirates' population - who enjoy visa-free travel to only a few dozen countries - attaining a passport with fewer visa restrictions is an attractive idea.

Passports issued by Antigua and Barbuda, a twin-island nation in the Caribbean, allow one to travel to 132 countries visa-free or visa-on-arrival, including the UK and Canada. In comparison, an Indian passport enables that ease of access to just 52 countries; for Emirati passports, the number is 77.

A Henley & Partners report issued last year ranks the Antiguan and Barbudan passport 24th worldwide in terms of visa restrictions.

Now, for the sum of "just" 1.4m Emirati dirhams ($380,000), UAE property developers SweetHomes will sell a two-bedroom villa in Ajman and include complementary Antigua and Barbuda passports for the buyer, his or her spouse, dependent children and parents over the age of 65.

The Ajman-based developer, whose offer applies to 600 units within the 1,500-villa Ajman Uptown development, signed an implementation agreement with the Antiguan and Barbudan government last November, and has begun to aggressively promote the deal.

"Ajman Uptown is the first project of its kind in the GCC region that allows the buyers … to be eligible for citizenship, subject to due diligence and approval from the government of Antigua and Barbuda," Sweet Homes CEO Fahad Dero told Al Jazeera.

Those who qualify for the scheme never even have to set foot in the tiny Caribbean nation, which is home to just over 90,000 people. Tourism has long been Antigua and Barbuda's major export, accounting for 63 percent of the country's approximately $1.2bn gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, Antigua and Barbuda ranks sixth in the world in terms of the tourism sector's contribution to GDP.

But with competition from a slew of other island resort destinations, tourism has slowed. That, combined with the fallout from an awkward relationship with the collapsed Stanford Financial Group, has meant that Antigua and Barbuda has had to become inventive in its capital-raising.

"On coming to power, the newly elected government of Antigua and Barbuda realised that it had been left in a precarious financial position," explained Henley & Partners' Caribbean managing partner, Christopher Willis. "To fill the many critical budgetary gaps, it has been aggressively creative in finding new sources of revenue."

Henley & Partners designed the country's Citizenship-by-Investment Programme (CIP) under government mandate in 2013, he said. "It was one of the tools available, and to jump-start investment in the programme the government experimented with ways to increase applications,like offering economic citizenship as an incentive to potential investors in other projects, such as the Ajman development."