Africa cannot develop a tourism economy without Africans
Africans must be able to move freely across continental borders if Africa is to become a competitive tourism destination.
Tourism in Africa is on an upward trajectory, with a sharp increase in visitor numbers since 2021 that some estimates suggest makes it the fastest-growing tourism market in the world. According to UN Tourism, travel and tourism made up 8.5% of Africa’s gross domestic product in 2023 and is projected to create 18 million new jobs by 2028. The UN agency also claimed that tourism comprised nearly half of the exports from Cabo Verde and The Gambia in 2023.
However, Africa tends to be overlooked by travelers despite its breathtaking beauty and fascinating blend of ancient and modern history. According to UN Tourism’s latest World Tourism Barometer, Africa received only 74 million of the estimated 1.4 billion arrivals by international tourists in 2024—approximately 5 percent.
Africa earned a mere $42.6 billion of the $1.6 trillion generated last year from international tourism receipts. When measured by indices such as arrivals, export revenues and spending per arrival, Africa’s share of the global tourism pie remains small in relative as well as absolute terms.
African governments and continental institutions like the African Development Bank (AfDB) and African Union (AU) have committed to prioritizing tourism and boosting the share of the continent’s economy that comes from travel and hospitality.
They have implemented policy measures such as visa liberalization, tourism promotion schemes and investments in infrastructure like roads and airports, all of which have played a role in the expansion of tourism in Africa from a base of 26 million international tourists in 2000 to 74 million last year.
While the growth of tourism in Africa is undeniable, there remains a lot of work to be done if the continent is to broaden its share of the approximately $16.5 trillion that the World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that the industry will contribute to the global economy by 2035.
The feedback from my post in June that listed ten African destinations to visit in 2025 went further and wider than I anticipated — remember to use the “leave a comment” button, friends — and some of it inspired this newsletter entry, which offers wide-ranging commentary on trends in African tourism and critically analyzes the policies African governments and regional institutions have implemented in the industry.
The rise and rise of African travel
African travel subcultures have arguably never been more vibrant. Rising incomes, technological advancements and expanded access to different modes of transportation have all contributed to a growth in the number of Africans who travel within their borders and beyond them.
Millions of Africans desire to learn about, make connections with and visit other parts of their continent, and are acting on that impulse.
According to the African Airlines Association, 37% of the total traffic of African airlines in the fourth quarter of 2024 was from domestic flights and another 31% came from intra-African flights. During the same period, 42% of the international traffic of African airlines was driven by intra-African routes. A sizable portion of international arrivals to tourism hotspots like Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and South Africa are by travelers from neighboring countries as well as others from more distant parts on the continent.
Popular travel influencers like Amarachi Ekekwe, Gophari, Tayo Aina and Wode Maya are reshaping the way millions of Africans perceive their continent and making faraway societies feel within closer reach. Tech startups and tour operators like Travelbeta, Landtours Ghana, TravelYalla and Bonfire Adventures are democratizing the tourism model and transforming the hospitality experience for Africans by catering to the needs of an underserved market.
Campaigns like Kenya’s Tembea Kenya, Nigeria’s See Naija initiative, Taamu Senegal and Ñu Dem Ndar in Senegal, Sho’t Left in South Africa and Tanzania’s Twenzetu Kileleni are prominent examples of the way African governments and non-state operators have sought to promote domestic tourism by showcasing local attractions and encouraging folks to explore their country.
These developments have played a significant role in boosting domestic travel and attracting international visitors, creating jobs, enabling regional integration through intra-African travel and enhancing the growth of African creative services.
The invisibility of roads in African travel discourse
Roads are the dominant mode of transportation in Africa. One estimate by the AfDB put the share of passenger travel that takes place on roads at 90%. The high cost of air travel and the decline of once-prominent rail networks across the continent means that roads are the only realistic means of travel for most Africans, including many who cross national borders.
However, discourse about and policy towards travel and tourism in Africa focuses disproportionately on air travel. Commentary about the challenges of travel to and within Africa typically centers on aviation-related concerns like the cost of air tickets, the limited availability and frequency of direct flights, onerous visa policies and the state of African airports.
African governments typically allocate unearthly sums of money towards the building or “renovation” of airport infrastructure, often at the expense of repairing the dreadful road networks used by most of the population.
There are considerations of political economy at play here. The uneven focus on aviation stems from several factors that broadly reflect the preference of those with agenda-setting influence in domestic travel industries, namely policymakers, tourism entrepreneurs, private sector organizations and ordinary citizens who have the disposable income to afford air travel. It is also downstream of fundamental beliefs among many Africans about the kind of tourism that they value and the travelers they believe that their countries should be attracting i.e. Western visitors.
Aviation-related spending is also a valuable tool of patronage in the hands of political elites, and a means of signaling to investors, donors, international financial institutions and other “development partners” who African government officials spend an inordinate amount of their time glad-handing that they are serious about “attracting foreign investment,” to mention one of their many shibboleths.
The tendency by African governments to place a disproportionate emphasis on air travel at the expense of other forms of transportation does not make sense, given aviation’s intensive cost, Africa’s income profile and the concentrated trail of air passenger traffic across the continent. In other words, there are not enough flights and passengers to, from and within Africa to justify the skewed spending on aviation.
Some of the effort African governments invest on aviation should go towards upgrading road and rail networks, and boosting maritime transportation in areas with large bodies of water. This does not suggest that African governments should scale back altogether on aviation, but a balanced approach in the policymaking aimed at boosting travel and tourism is needed.
For my money, road travel is the best way to explore Africa. Most of my travels across the continent including in West Africa, the region I am most knowledgeable about and where I spend a majority of my time on the continent, have been by road. It can be cumbersome and is not without its downsides, but no other mode of transportation offers the same immersive experience and opportunity to soak in Africa’s beautiful landscapes.
If you’re interested, follow the Trans African Tourism and Unity Campaign, an initiative that advocates for a “borderless” Africa by embarking on a 40,000-kilometer journey across 39 African countries. The campaign is being led by a former Ghanaian lawmaker, and has been endorsed by Ghana’s foreign ministry.
Decentering the Western gaze
Tourism in Africa might experience a more robust, sustainable growth if it catered more to what should be its most loyal consumer base: African travelers, domestic and intra-continental alike.
Generally speaking, Africa’s tourism industries are based on mental models of what policymakers and industry operators believe will draw the interest of Western travelers, and are optimized to prioritize them at the expense of visitors from Africa and other parts of the world.
Tourism entrepreneurs in many countries, primarily those in East and Southern Africa, place a disproportionate emphasis on safari tourism and other one-dimensional offerings at the expense of more dynamic travel experiences that appeal to a wider spectrum of visitors.
Cabo Verde and Morocco, two countries which draw a large portion of tourism arrivals from Europe and have a special relationship with the European Union, made different attempts to join the EU that did not materialize.
From the visa policies adopted by many African governments to the preferential treatment shown to non-African and non-black travelers at African airports, hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and other establishments, Africa’s tourism economy operates on racial hierarchies and imperial legacies that are inherent in the global travel industry.
Those who defend such policies and marketing strategies that many African countries adopt in their tourism industry typically do so on the grounds that visitors from Europe and North America have higher incomes than their African counterparts, and thus it makes sense from an economic standpoint to place a premium on attracting and retaining Western travelers.
There are several flaws with this argument including the economic rationality on which it is premised. The share of Western tourists that travels to Africa is incredibly small, given that tourists all over the world are most likely to travel to destinations in close proximity to where they live. This is a phenomenon that has held steady for several decades and intensified since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2023, 73% of the more than 1.1 billion trips Europeans took were to destinations within their country. When Europeans traveled outside their country, nearly 90% of those trips were to other European countries while approximately 4% of European travelers visited African destinations in 2023.
Canada and Mexico typically make up the largest outbound market for travelers who reside in the United States, while Europe comprised ten of the top 20 countries where US-based travelers visited in 2022, according to the International Trade Administration, an agency of the US Department of Commerce. There also, Africa barely showed up in the data.
China’s inbound tourism has rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic on the patronage of visitors from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, as illustrated by data from China’s National Immigration Administration.
Even if one were to take the view that even a slight boost in the volume of tourists from the West and other high-income regions of the world would make a major impact on African tourism receipts, that would be a significant bet.
According to the AU’s African Tourism Strategic Framework 2019-2028, Africa attracts an average spending per visitor of $600 against a global average of nearly $1,000. It is possible that non-African visitors to the continent might increase their spending over time, but such an uptick is unlikely to be significant given the prevalence of other travel patterns.
If the axiom holds that all politics is local, the same tends to be true about tourism—and trade, of which tourism is one form. Tourists all over the world tend to visit destinations closer to them and spend more money there, because it is more cost-effective than traveling to more distant locations.
Governments and other sectoral participants must ditch their outmoded preconceptions about tourism, and adopt a more reality-based approach that places Africans at the heart of their effort to build an inclusive travel industry.
It’s (still) hard out here for an African traveler
If I had a dollar for every burdensome ordeal I’ve experienced while traveling across Africa, I might have enough money to take over my beloved Arsenal FC.
Intra-African travel is not for the faint of heart. The road network in many parts of the continent is abysmal and cross-border travel by rail and water is incredibly limited, leaving air as the only real option in many if not most instances. Airfares are too damn high due to factors like infrastructural deficits, limited competition, and a bevy of miscellaneous taxes and charges levied on airlines and passengers.
Intra-African flights are irregular, infrequently direct and sometimes scheduled to inopportune timeslots. Border officers are often poorly equipped to administer immigration rules and regularly disrupt mobility by harassing, extorting and threatening travelers.
Where to begin with the question of securing visas! As I wrote in a piece four years ago:
… in many countries across West Africa and beyond, visa rules and other travel information cannot be accessed on government websites, and even when they are available, the information is often unclear, confusing and opaque to would-be visitors, many of whom arrive at arrival ports unaware of entry requirements. Visa-on-arrival rules remain inconsistent and incoherent, despite national and regional efforts to simplify them. And more than five years after its launch, and despite repeated pledges by AU officials to make it more widely available, the African Union passport has largely been issued only to government leaders, diplomats and VIPs, while remaining mostly out of reach for the overwhelming majority of African citizens. And even there, the AU passport and the privilege it implies isn’t enough to alleviate travel difficulties, with Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, and WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala both recently sharing anecdotes of the difficulties they have faced at African ports of entry despite carrying the AU passport.
According to the latest Africa Visa Openness Report, a joint publication by the AfDB and AU, 47% of intra-African travel routes require a visa before departure, while Africans can obtain a visa on arrival for only 25% of intra-African travel routes.
Ethiopia, where the headquarters of the AU is located, is an illustrative example of the difficulty Africans face in moving across their continent. Ethiopia does not guarantee visa-free travel for African passport holders, as it abandoned the policy after briefly implementing it following Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power in 2018. In 2022, Nigerian media outlets reported that Ethiopia suspended visa on arrival privileges for travelers from Nigeria and 41 other countries, many of which were African.
Like many other African countries, Ethiopia imposes strict visa requirements on Africans while maintaining more lenient policies for non-African travelers, particularly those from Western nations. Visitors from the US, Canada, the United Kingdom and EU are typically granted e-visas and visas on arrival without any hassle, while many African travelers must apply in advance and meet extensive documentation requirements.
If African nations are to realize the goals of the AU’s Agenda 2063, which aims to double tourism’s contribution to Africa’s GDP by 2033 and create “a continent with seamless borders,” they cannot continue to pursue measures that discourage Africans from participating in the mobility, trade, commercial and cultural exchanges required to achieve those objectives.
Fortunately, tangible steps are being taken to boost visa access and intra-African travel more broadly. Many more countries are signing on to bilateral air service agreements that will expand connectivity across the continent. One such partnership between Nigeria and Tanzania recently cleared the way for Air Tanzania to commence flights between Dar es Salaam and Lagos.
Visa openness across Africa is at a much higher level today than it was in 2016, when the first Africa Visa Openness Index Report was published. Earlier this year, Ghana announced that it will allow visa-free travel for African passport holders, become the fifth country to do so after Bénin, The Gambia, Rwanda and The Seychelles. Last month, many media outlets reported that Kenya had “officially” abolished visa requirements for all but two African countries, although it’s worth noting that Kenyan authorities have made similar declarations in the past that were not quite as advertised.
These measures are a testament to the incremental, worthwhile efforts made by African people and governments to ease travel and foster collaborations across continental borders. But the progress is uneven and could be more significant. Africa can and must go further.
The need for a paradigm shift
African discourses about the mobility of the continent’s people—particularly in the contexts of tourism and migration—generally adopt the tendency by outsiders to overemphasize South-North movements at the expense of the far more prevalent and consequential pattern of intra-African mobility.
Many people including Africans would bristle at the notion that the continent’s cities are “international” or “global” in the same way that they would regard London, New York and Paris or even Dubai and Shanghai, despite the history, large population, diversity and cultural influence of cities like Cairo, Kinshasa, Lagos and Nairobi. (Johannesburg is sometimes an exception that proves the rule).
The continent’s communities are no less dynamic and universal than their counterparts in other parts of the world. As such, Africans must lean into their continent’s cosmopolitanism and leverage it for the opportunity that it presents.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which shares a border with nine other countries, it is not uncommon to find people in large cities like Kinshasa, Kisangani or Lubumbashi with parents of different nationalities—like Angolan/Zambian or Congolese/Tanzanian, say—and who possess varying degrees of competency in up to ten languages. The maman in Abidjan who makes the most bomb kedjenou or attiéké poisson on a street in Treichville could be a Togolese or Guinean migrant who has lived in Côte d'Ivoire for 30 years.
A sizable population of Shona people from Southern Africa, which has lived in Kenya for many decades, has finally begun to get citizenship of that country after many years of activism around the issue. There is at least one person of practically every nationality on earth in Lagos, a city which some estimates have projected will be the world’s most populous city by 2100.
Ouled Ziane, a bustling neighborhood in Casablanca, Morocco, is more or less a “Little ECOWAS,” given how easy it is to overhear West African languages like Bambara, Hausa, Maninka, Moré and Wolof.
The effort to fully unlock Africa’s tourism potential must begin with a shift in the way Africans think about their continent, its people and places. African governments should do away with the antiquated beliefs and practices around which they built their existing tourism models, and update them with endogenous, self-referential frameworks that are cognizant of shifts in the travel conversation on the continent and beyond it.
They must expand infrastructure, simplify travel policies especially for African visitors and invest in marketing campaigns that tell better stories about the landscapes, cultural heritage and vibrancy of African societies.
Tourism is no less prone to the pitfalls of the so-called Dutch disease1 , and governments must avoid repeating the same mistakes that they have made in other industries. They should think of tourism not as a revenue-generation opportunity but more as a catalyst for employment, technological innovation, cultural preservation and national branding.
Travel must be inclusive and sustainable, and not lock out communities from the benefits of tourism. Not all types of tourism are good, and this should not be a controversial point to make. Governments must protect heritage sites to prevent displacement and commodification, and ensure that tourism operators invest in local artisans, storytellers, guides and other community members.
If tourism is to become a lever for socioeconomic transformation on the continent, African people and their governments must work together to create a comprehensive travel ecosystem that ensures a sustainable balance between tourism’s potential benefits and societal costs.
I am a critic of the “Dutch disease” theory, but I used the term here for referential purposes.
I totally agree with you.
I mean, combine numbers from both Cabo Verde and the Gambia. It's still a far cry to the Grand Bazaar market in Turkey, with annual visitors numbering 92 millions.
Let's wake up in Africa!
A lot of “tourism development” talk is really just code for making places easier to consume, not easier to live in. When the people who actually live there can’t move freely, affordably, or with dignity, the whole model starts to feel upside down.
What you’re pointing at isn’t just a tourism problem. It’s a power problem. Who gets to move, who gets welcomed, and who the system is actually built for. Until that’s addressed, all the branding in the world is just decoration on top of a broken foundation.
Uncomfortable read. Necessary one.