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“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” It is a clever line, often quoted in boardrooms and strategy retreats. But he was also a man who, almost certainly, never had to travel the continent with a Nigerian passport. We speak the dialect of a “borderless” digital economy, yet we move across our own continent like unwelcome guests. The paradox is stark: Nigeria is projected to be the world’s third most populous nation by 2050, wielding a cultural soft power that dictates global charts. We are Africa’s largest nominal GDP engine and its venture funding magnet. Yet, we live inside aviation islands, internally disconnected, externally tethered. Mobility is not a “travel issue”; it is infrastructure revealed in boarding passes. While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU) professionals glide through open-air economies, 72% of intra-African travel still requires a visa. Now let’s consider the “Mobility Ratio”: A Singaporean passport holder accesses 4x more destinations bureaucracy-free than a Nigerian. This gap isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a Domestic-Only Penalty. Our data shows that a pan-African consultant earns 5x more than a domestic-only practitioner. The difference isn’t the CV; it’s the passport. A business trip between three African countries in five days. On a map, the route looked elegantly simple, a neat triangular loop within the continent. In my inbox, the itinerary told a different story. To make it work without losing entire days to layovers and visa queues, I had to fly into Europe three separate times, exiting the continent just to re-enter it. Lagos to Europe to Africa, then Africa to Europe to Africa. Each connection felt like a commentary. The skies above us were open, but our borders and systems were not. This friction has a specific victim: The Woman in Leadership. We often attribute the attrition of women at the senior executive level to “culture” or “unpaid care.” While true, we overlook the Infrastructure Filter. When a 48-hour deal-closing trip morphs into a three-week logistical marathon of consular backlogs and opaque rules, organisations default to the “path of least resistance.” They send the person for whom the path is smoother. The result is a persistent erosion of women’s visibility and influence in regional and global spaces. You do not publicly remove women from the table; you quietly make it harder for them to get to the table. This isn’t just a “women’s issue.” It is an economic leak. If women represent up to 70% of informal cross-border trade but face the highest barriers to formal mobility, we are capping our GDP by design. Inclusion here then becomes a transport protocol, not an HR policy. And yet this is the same continent that has launched one of the most ambitious economic projects in the world. The African Continental Free Trade Area promises a single market of over a billion people and a combined GDP of $10.8 trillion. Projections suggest that by 2035, if AfCFTA is fully implemented, income gains could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions could be lifted out of poverty. The agreement recognises not just the movement of goods, but also the movement of services, including what trade lawyers call Mode 4, the temporary movement of people to provide services across borders. On paper, we understand that ideas and expertise need legs, not just fibre optic cables. In reality, our behaviour reveals a different fact. Tariffs are discussed, negotiated, and reduced, while non-tariff barriers like visas, fragmented regulations, and underdeveloped aviation routes continue to quietly choke the arteries of intra-African trade. We are, in effect, externally connected but internally disconnected. It is easier for an African founder to meet a European investor in Paris than to meet an African customer in a neighbouring country. It is easier for foreign capital to move freely into African markets than for African professionals to move freely between those same markets. To make it worse, the perception of African travel is still questioned over Europe, a mindset engineering that only occurs when we view ourselves through a warped lens. Much less, working in Africa versus Europe/the West. We proudly call ourselves global, but remain strangely constrained at home. What might a serious solution look like? It has to be a deliberate reframing of mobility as critical economic infrastructure, as fundamental as ports, power, or digital networks, not another slogan about free movement. It must start from a simple insight: states have legitimate security concerns about migration, but those concerns can be addressed with better tools, not just tighter gates. Imagine a continental framework where businesspersons and value creators are not treated as strangers at every border, but as known, pre-vetted participants in a shared growth project. They register once, their identities and credentials are verified using modern digital systems, and their histories are checked and cross-checked. Immigration authorities across participating states can view this information in advance, make independent decisions, and issue approvals in a structured and predictable way. Once cleared, these travellers carry a recognised digital credential, secure, revocable, but trusted, that allows them to move across a network of African countries with far less friction. In such a system, the entrepreneur from Lagos could fly to Kigali, then on to Nairobi and Addis Ababa, without re-entering the same bureaucratic maze at each leg. Airlines could design routes that reflect real demand rather than old hub patterns. Time would shift from visa queues to deal rooms and factory floors. Risk would be managed not by blanket suspicion, but by data and cooperation. States would not be asked to surrender sovereignty; they would be invited to exercise it more intelligently, together. We are not starting from zero. Across the continent, serious attempts are already underway to tackle the mobility question from different angles. AfCFTA has begun technical work on making the movement of trusted businesspersons real. Regional bodies are experimenting with visa-free regimes and common passports. Development partners and international organisations are funding programmes on labour migration, skills mobility, and digital identity. Innovation platforms are
Read MoreWhen Kennedy Adetayo needed to be in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the opening of his company’s new office, the hardest part wasn’t preparing presentations or coordinating the launch. It was getting into the country. Adetayo, then a regional marketing lead at global brokerage firm Exness, oversaw markets across West, East, and Southern Africa, a role that required constant travel. Within West Africa, the logistics were manageable. But crossing into Southern Africa, particularly South Africa, became a recurring obstacle. His visa applications were rejected twice. “I applied twice,” said Adetayo. “One was for the sticker visa (business), which was denied, and I missed my office opening. [The other] was an eVisa, which was approved but had very short validity.” Stories like Adetayo’s are one reason South Africa has introduced the Meetings, Events, Exhibitions, and Tourism (MEETS) visa, a new programme designed to make it easier for conference organisers to bring international delegates and short-term travellers into the country. Launched in February 2026, the MEETS visa will allow accredited event organisers to submit bulk applications for conference delegates through a digital platform, promising faster processing and fewer bureaucratic hurdles. Designed for short-term travellers, including digital nomads, tourists, and conference delegates, the scheme offers a faster route into South Africa for those entering the country for meetings, events, exhibitions, and tourism. The visa programme is part of the country’s broader plan to position itself as Africa’s leading destination for global events and to remove visa bottlenecks that have long undermined that ambition. How the MEETS visa works The MEETS programme shifts visa responsibility partly to event organisers. Accredited organisers can submit group visa applications for registered delegates through a secure digital portal, reducing paperwork and accelerating approvals. “The MEETS visa scheme will allow accredited and reputable event organisers to facilitate and submit group visa applications, subject to the risk profile of the delegates, through a secure digital platform,” the DHA said. To qualify, organisers must score at least 120 out of 140 points on a compliance scorecard, which evaluates factors such as event scale, regulatory compliance, and delegate management. Event organisers must have a minimum of 500 registered event delegates in the past two years, an online delegate register submitted 60 days before the event, and comply with the Safety, Sports and Recreational Events Act. Organisers are also required to enter a formal agreement with the DHA. Applications are reviewed by an inter-departmental committee involving the Departments of Home Affairs, Tourism, and Trade. The scheme is part of a broader immigration modernisation drive led by Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber. The conundrum at the heart of South Africa’s events industry South Africa is already the continent’s most decorated events hub. The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) ranks it as the top business event destination in Africa and the Middle East. In 2023, the country hosted 98 association meetings that met ICCA’s strict criteria, generating over R2 billion ($110 million) in economic impact. At the Meetings Africa 2026 conference in Johannesburg, Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille said the industry’s contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) nearly doubled from R371 million ($22.4 million) in 2023 to R690 million ($41.5 million) in 2025, while supporting over 2,600 jobs. Yet, beneath the rankings and figures lies a contradiction: the country that markets itself as a world-class events destination has long operated a visa system that many users say is slow, unpredictable, and often difficult to navigate without agency help. Adetayo’s experience reflects that friction. After eventually securing an eVisa for one trip, he ran into problems while travelling through Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport. “They [officials] assumed my eVisa was fake,” he said. “Their server was down and couldn’t recognise the QR [quick response] code. It was rectified just in time for my flight.” Even beyond technical issues, he says scrutiny often intensifies when officials see his passport. “Aside from the extra scrutiny when they find out I’m Nigerian—which is common in many places I’ve travelled—South Africa is a beautiful country,” said Adetayo. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe A visa system that deters travellers For many travellers from non-exempt countries, including much of Africa, attending an event in South Africa has long meant navigating a Kafkaesque process. Applications are submitted through the outsourcing firm, VFS Global, which acts as an intermediary between applicants and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The firm submits applications to the DHA for review before a multi-layered checking process kicks in. First, a DHA verification team assesses the applications and forwards a recommendation to a Director for Quality Assurance. The Director then confirms which applications meet their rigorous compliance thresholds and those that pose risks. Final decisions are recorded in the government’s Movement Control System and sent back to the mission or the VFS centre abroad. The entire process can take weeks or months, and for some applicants, it ends up in rejection without a clear explanation. The Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA), a lobby group for sustainable tourism in the country, has said the system undermined its competitiveness as a travel destination. “Complex, slow, and unpredictable visa processes have undermined South Africa’s ability to compete with other global destinations, particularly in attracting travellers from key long-haul markets such as Europe, North America, and parts of Asia,” Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, TBCSA CEO, told local publication IOL. In 2024, a survey by Tourism Update, a South African tourism publication, noted that 71.4% of tourism service providers had
Read MoreCossi Achille Arouko noticed the problem while watching someone else solve it. As tech lead at Paystack, the Stripe-owned Nigerian fintech, he watched how Divvy, a US finance management platform, handled the company’s expenses: corporate cards issued to employees, automatic spending limits, and reimbursement requests processed without anyone chasing anyone. It was clean. It was controlled. And when he looked around at the African businesses he knew, nothing existed as it did for them. “I realised there was also a market for businesses,” Arouko says. “Seeing Divvy and other platforms tackling expense management in the US and Europe — that’s when I thought we could work on that for this market.” That observation, made in 2021, became Bujeti that same year, a Lagos-based fintech that has since grown into what its founders call a finance control centre for African businesses. In practice, Bujeti works as a finance assistant; a finance manager logs in, sets spending limits on corporate cards issued to employees, approves vendor payments, tracks Value Added Tax (VAT) automatically set aside in a tax vault, and runs payroll, all without switching between tools or chasing anyone on WhatsApp. Alongside co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Samy Chiba, Arouko has spent the last four years turning a simple observation into a platform that today serves over 5,000 finance professionals across Nigeria and Kenya, with its sights firmly set on the rest of the continent. Day 1: From diaspora tool to business operating system Bujeti’s first version was a personal finance app built for the African diaspora to automate remittances back home and track how recipients spent the money. It was a real problem with a real audience. But while building it, Arouko kept bumping into a bigger one. African businesses, from small shops to mid-sized companies, had no clean way to manage how money moved internally. Expenses were tracked over WhatsApp messages. Vendor payments were approved over Slack. Reconciliations happened at the end of the month, in spreadsheets, with all the errors that imply. Bujeti pivoted to a business-to-business (B2B) model in 2022, and Chiba, who was working at Ariane Space, a commercial space transport company in France at the time, joined as a co-founder. The two had a clear founding idea: control and transparency over how money moves within a business. Not just sending and receiving, but everything in between. Getting their first serious client illustrated exactly how hard that idea was to sell. The team had demoed to a global food delivery company’s finance team in Lagos. The accountants loved it. Then, a decision-maker elsewhere in the organisation blocked adoption. Arouko found the CEO online, sent a message, suggested coffee, and demoed again. The CEO called the Nigerian office immediately, “What’s going on? Why are we not on this?” They’ve been customers since. “Unfortunately, yes,” Arouko says when asked if going over the finance team’s head has had to happen often. “Finance teams can sometimes feel threatened by it. But after a while, they end up adopting.” Day 500: YC, a crisis, and the night nobody slept In early 2023, Bujeti got into Y Combinator’s Winter cohort, one of a handful of African startups to make it into the much-coveted accelerator that year. Chiba and Arouko packed up and went to San Francisco. Then Bujeti’s payment provider went down due to operational issues. “Everything happened in 24 hours,” Chiba says. With a nine-hour time difference and their team back in Nigeria scrambling, the founders spent the night managing the crisis on one front and hunting for a new provider on another. By morning, they had found one. The new provider asked when they were ready to integrate. The answer was: now. Paperwork signed, integration started, Bujeti was back up within 24 hours. They were five minutes late for their YC office hours meeting. The YC partners weren’t happy until they heard why. “They actually ended up liking it,” Arouko says. “They realised we were in crisis and we’d fixed it.” The crisis clarified something important about what Bujeti was building. In markets like the US, a fintech can assume stable infrastructure and layer a product on top. In Africa, you can’t. Providers go down. Systems break. The businesses that survive are the ones that have built redundancy into their foundations. “We are able to build on top of a broken ecosystem,” Chiba says, or as Arouko prefers, an immature one. The distinction matters to him. Broken implies unfixable. Immature implies a direction. YC reinforced something else: the scale of what they were competing for. In San Francisco, Bujeti was in the same room as Brex, Ramp and other giants of global business finance. “It made me understand that yes, Bujeti is an African company,” Chiba says, “But our competitors, our colleagues, are the biggest players on the planet.” In December 2023, Bujeti closed a $2 million seed round led by Y Combinator, with participation from Entrée Capital, Voltron Capital, Kima Ventures, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and Mono CEO Abdul Hassan. Day 1000: Tax vaults, partnerships and the next frontier By 2025, Bujeti had expanded beyond expense management into something harder to categorise. Corporate cards. Multi-currency payments. Payroll. Automated reconciliation. And most recently, tax management, a product the team had been building before Nigeria’s 2025 Tax Act came into force, but landed at exactly the right moment when it did. “Opportunity meets preparation,” Arouko says. The platform’s Tax Vault automatically ring-fences collected Value Added Tax (VAT) and withheld taxes so that businesses can’t accidentally spend the money before remittance is due. It was a product Arouko had wanted as a business owner himself. “As a business lead, if I need it, it should be on Bujeti because other business leads will definitely need it too.” The institutional partnerships have followed the product. Bujeti says it partnered with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and, more recently, with Nigeria’s Presidential Committee on Economic and Financial Inclusion (PreCEFI) — operating under the Office of the
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