Day: January 7, 2026

December 2025 produced three developments that, read separately, each tell a partial story. Read together, they raise a single question that cuts across all of them: when tourism growth arrives in Africa, who captures it, and who absorbs its costs?

In Lagos, sections of Makoko were demolished under urban renewal justifications, displacing thousands of residents without adequate resettlement. In East and Southern Africa, domestic travelers quietly outperformed international markets in revenue contribution. And globally, cultural tourism continued its evolution from passive observation toward immersive participation, driven by demand that Africa is positioned to serve but has not yet systematically packaged.

These stories are three expressions of the same underlying challenge: Africa’s tourism growth is accelerating, but the systems designed to distribute its benefits and manage its costs remain underdeveloped.

The City and the Waterfront: What Makoko Reveals About Urban Tourism Strategy

Between December 2025 and early January 2026, targeted sections of Makoko, the riverine community along the Lagos Lagoon on mainland Lagos, were demolished. Thousands of residents were displaced. Civil society groups argued the demolitions violated international human rights standards. The government cited public safety risks from power lines. Whatever the legal justification, the outcome is consistent with a pattern that urban development research documents across rapidly urbanising cities: forced evictions rarely resolve the structural conditions that produce informal settlements. They merely relocate them.

Lagos faces a choice: treat waterfront communities as obstacles to development, or as permanent parts of the city with economic and cultural value that formal planning has not yet learned to capture.

Slum dynamics persist because they emerge from structural factors that include rural-urban migration driven by economic opportunity, insufficient affordable housing, weak land tenure, and informal labour markets that absorb workers essential to urban economies. When demolition proceeds without parallel provision of affordable housing, land tenure reform, or livelihood planning, the phenomenon surfaces in another part of the city within years.

The instructive comparisons are not hypothetical. Rio de Janeiro’s Favela-Bairro programme, implemented between 1994 and 2008, installed basic infrastructure; water, sanitation, electricity; within favelas. Land tenure was formalized and community centres and healthcare facilities were built within settlements. Some favelas in Rio’s South Zone, including Rocinha and Vidigal, subsequently developed tourism economies: guided tours, community-led cultural experiences, small hospitality ventures, and short-term rentals generating income that stayed, at least partially, within the community. Benefits are uneven and not all revenues remain local. But the model demonstrates that informal waterfront settlements can generate economic value when planned for rather than periodically cleared.

Benin’s Ganvié offers a different register. Built on stilts over Lake Nokoué, home to approximately 20,000 residents and now on UNESCO’s Tentative List of World Heritage Sites, Ganvié demonstrates how a water-based settlement can evolve into a cultural heritage destination while remaining a functioning community. Fishing and local trade remain central to daily life, while tourism provides supplementary income. The settlement faces infrastructure and environmental pressures such as water quality, structural maintenance and sanitation, but it has been planned for, rather than cleared.

Makoko’s viability as a comparable destination depends on whether Lagos is willing to make the investment that transformation requires: formalised tenure, basic infrastructure, environmental management, and a planning framework that incorporates rather than periodically removes. Without these, demolition produces visible action without durable change. Residents may relocate to equally vulnerable sites but the underlying housing demand remains unresolved and the structural pressures will resurface elsewhere in the city.

Lagos promotes creativity, tourism, and lifestyle branding. It has not yet decided whether the communities that define its waterfront character belong in that story.

The Data That Changes the Argument: Africa’s Domestic Tourism Revenue

Kenya’s national parks recorded over 313,000 visitors in December 2025. Domestic tourists accounted for 231,000 of them, nearly three times the 82,500 international visitors. The Kenya Wildlife Service’s framing was deliberate: local travellers form the backbone of the country’s tourism economy.

Across Africa’s largest tourism markets, the revenue data contradicts the dominant policy assumption that international arrivals are the primary engine of tourism income.

In South Africa, domestic tourism spending reached approximately R430 billion in 2024, nearly four times the R116.5 billion generated by international visitors. In Kenya, domestic spending exceeded international receipts by more than 80 per cent. In Nigeria, the gap is more pronounced still: domestic tourism generated ₦5.35 trillion against ₦655 billion from international arrivals, a ratio of more than 8:1.

The picture inverts in North Africa. Egypt’s international tourism generated EGP 726.9 billion against EGP 449.9 billion in domestic spending. Morocco follows a comparable structure, with infrastructure, marketing, and connectivity heavily oriented toward European and regional international markets. Both countries have built tourism economies that perform well under stable global conditions and contract sharply when conditions shift. Morocco’s international receipts fell by more than 50 per cent in 2020. The structural exposure is documented and consistent.

The assumption that international arrivals are Africa’s primary tourism revenue engine is not supported by the data from the continent’s largest markets. In several of them, it has not been true for years.

What the data reveals is an underinvestment gap. Countries that built domestic tourism infrastructure with accessible pricing, internal mobility systems, year-round programming for local audiences, have developed internal markets that compete with or exceed international receipts. Yet tourism policy across much of the continent remains disproportionately focused on attracting foreign visitors through international branding and marketing campaigns aimed at European and North American source markets.

The strategic implication is to stop treating domestic tourism as fallback revenue and recognise it as the primary base it already is in several of Africa’s most significant tourism economies. Building this foundation requires sustained investment in internal mobility, accessible pricing that enables broader middle-class participation, and year-round product development that gives domestic travellers reasons to move within their own countries throughout the year.

Culture as Participation: The Conversion Gap Africa Has Not Yet Closed

China recorded 5.6 billion domestic trips and nearly 1.5 billion museum visits in 2024. Cultural tourism products such as heritage workshops, guided tours, culinary experiences, and living culture encounters surged in 2025 with double-digit growth in visitor orders and ticket sales.

The demand comes from travellers seeking cooking classes, calligraphy workshops, tea ceremonies, traditional clothing experiences, and homestays. These travellers desire hands-on engagement with heritage and daily life.

This pattern is not China-specific. UN Tourism estimates approximately 40 per cent of all international tourists now travel primarily to experience culture. Kayak’s 2026 travel research signals the same direction among younger travellers: small towns, rural areas, immersive cultural encounters, and destinations off the established circuit. The segment is large, growing, and willing to pay premium prices for experiences that feel genuine.

Africa’s position in this landscape is paradoxical. The continent possesses cultural assets with diverse ethnic traditions, musical heritage, textile crafts, culinary practice, archaeological sites, oral histories, living ceremonial culture, that are precisely what this demand is seeking.

Egypt has successfully commercialised its Pharaonic heritage at scale, with the Grand Egyptian Museum opening in November 2025 reinforcing its position as a global cultural destination. The Maasai communities of East Africa have developed cultural tourism that sustains both income and communal integrity. These are not isolated examples. They are proof that the demand can be met and the economic value can be captured.

Across most of the continent, cultural experiences remain informally organised, difficult to discover, and inconsistent in quality from a visitor’s perspective. A traveller willing to pay for a two-day immersive craft apprenticeship in a West African textile tradition cannot reliably find, book, or reach it through any platform that meets the expectations shaped by comparable experiences in Southeast Asia or Southern Europe. This is a structural and organizational gap.

Africa does not lack the culture that global demand is seeking. It lacks the packaging, the digital infrastructure, and the service consistency to convert that demand into economic value at scale.

Closing this gap requires three things working simultaneously. Training that equips cultural guides, artisans, and hospitality workers with interpretive skills and service standards, with care taken to ensure it is done without diluting authenticity. Digital infrastructure that allows travellers to discover and book cultural experiences through platforms that meet contemporary expectations. And community-led revenue models that ensure income reaches cultural practitioners directly, creating economic incentives for preservation.

Rural and heritage-based locations across the continent already appear on UN Tourism’s Best Tourism Villages list in recognition that the assets are present and the potential is understood internationally. Yet, it is the ecosystem infrastructure of service reliability, digital discoverability, physical access, trained personnel, that converts potential into performance.

That infrastructure is where the investment gap is most acute, and where it is most consequential.

What December’s Developments Tell Us

The three stories in this edition share a structural argument. Makoko is a story about who absorbs the costs of urban development that positions itself as tourism strategy. The domestic revenue data is a story about where tourism income actually comes from, and how misaligned policy investment has been with that reality. The cultural tourism gap is a story about a conversion problem: assets and demand exist on both sides, but the ecosystem infrastructure to connect them does not.

Lagos has a waterfront with genuine cultural and economic value. Africa’s middle class is already travelling and already spending at scale. The continent’s cultural heritage is precisely what the fastest-growing global tourism segments are seeking. The deficit is in the systems, the lack of planning frameworks, investment priorities, policy orientation, that determine whether value is captured broadly or narrowly, durably or not at all.

Tourism policy that focuses on international arrival numbers while underinvesting in domestic infrastructure, informal community integration, and cultural experience packaging is not building a resilient sector. Rather, it is building a sector that performs when conditions are favourable and contracts when they are not. The data from Africa’s strongest tourism economies already shows the alternative. The question is whether the policy follows.