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When 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
Read MoreKenya’s Court of Appeal struck down criminal penalties for publishing “false information” online, a decision that weakens a cybercrime law rights groups say has been used to arrest bloggers, journalists, and social media users since 2018. In a ruling delivered in Nairobi on Friday, a three-judge bench invalidated Sections 22 and 23 of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, saying the provisions were vague and infringed constitutional protections for freedom of expression and media freedom. The Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), Article 19 Eastern Africa, the Kenya Union of Journalists, and other civil society groups filed the case in the Court of Appeal. “This is not just a win for content creators or journalists. It is a win for every Kenyan who uses the internet to speak truth to power,” said Kennedy Kachwanya, chairperson of BAKE. The judges, Patrick Kiage, Aggrey Muchelule, and Weldon Korir, said the offences relating to “false publications” and “false information” failed the constitutional test of clarity and risked criminalising ordinary online speech. The court found the provisions were so broad that they could capture people who share information without knowing it is inaccurate. Criminalising “falsity,” the judges said, could suppress satire, opinion, and journalistic errors. Kenya passed the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act in 2018 to address online fraud, hacking, and digital harassment. From the start, media groups and digital rights activists challenged the law, arguing that some sections created a tool for policing online speech. Several bloggers and social media users have been investigated or arrested under the law’s “false information” provisions since it came into force, drawing criticism from press freedom groups. The High Court upheld most of the law in 2020, prompting the appeal that led to Friday’s ruling. Despite striking out the false information offences, the Court of Appeal left most of the statute intact. Judges upheld provisions allowing investigators to seek court warrants to search and seize digital data, issue production orders requiring service providers to release subscriber information, and conduct real-time data collection during investigations. The court also retained offences covering child sexual exploitation material and cybersquatting, which criminalise registering domain names in bad faith using another person’s trademark or identity. Digital rights groups welcomed the ruling but said broader concerns remain about the law’s surveillance powers. “The fake news offences have been weaponized time and time again to target journalists, content creators, members of the Public and anyone who dares to speak truth to power,” said Mercy Mutemi, BAKE’s lawyer. The petitioners said they were reviewing the judgment and might pursue further legal action on sections they argue still threaten privacy and civil liberties online.
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