Digital Nomads: How Amaka Amaku travelled to 27 countries with a Nigerian passport

Since 2021, Amaka Amaku, a social media-loving travel influencer, has not spent more than three consecutive months at her apartment in Lagos, Nigeria, where she’s based. On a call on November 17, 2025, she was in Berlin, Germany, taking a break between work meetings and executive MBA classes while scrolling through flight options for her next trip. “Lagos is my base, my home, but I barely spend up to three months at a stretch there,” said Amaku. “And if you don’t spend more than three months in a place, you can’t really say you live there. I’ve realised that my lifestyle is practically nomadic.” The bus trip to Accra All it took to set her off on this path was one impromptu bus trip to Accra, Ghana. In 2019, Amaku worked at a publishing house in Lagos. Some authors she was promoting planned a book chat and panel in Accra; the company was paying for their hotel, so she volunteered, paid for a bus ticket and joined the trip. The journey took more than 24 hours by road, and by the time she arrived in Ghana—tired, frazzled, and already checking flight prices back to Lagos—something had shifted. “When I went to Ghana, I knew that the life I knew before was never going to remain the same,” said Amaku. “That one stressful trip opened my mind in a way it never would have if I’d stayed home; I knew I would chase this and travel a lot more.” From that first trip, she began setting herself quiet challenges: one more country, then another, each destination proof that travel was not reserved for richer, more powerful passports. She has now visited 28 countries in total, though she insists the count is 27 because she only passed through Dubai’s airport on a long layover and refuses to claim a place she has not properly explored.  Her passport tells the real story: stamps from West African road trips, Schengen hops that string ten countries into a single itinerary, and journeys to places like Lebanon, Qatar, Singapore and Turkey, where she says she learned as much about community as she did about herself. Amaku at the Phoenician wall, Batroun, Lebanon “I’ve learned about sharing and community from Asian countries like Lebanon and Singapore,” said Amaku. “People there have this sense of togetherness; you feel how much they believe in people, and it changes how you see the world.” How Amaku travels on a Nigerian passport For many Nigerians, the first question about travel is not where to go, but how to get there when your passport is one of the weakest in the world. Amaku does not soften that reality; she leans into it, treating access as a problem to be solved repeatedly rather than a wall to turn back from. She still travels on a Nigerian passport, but layers it with every advantage she can find: residency, visa strategy, obsessive research and a work life built around flexibility. “Every year, I spend thousands and thousands of dollars on visa applications,” said Amaku. “I get some, I get denied for some, but the world is mine for exploration, so a visa denial will not stop me.” Her first structural hack was a residency in Benin Republic, a status she picked up after overhearing a casual conversation and deciding on the spot to pursue it. Amaku at Ouidah, Benin Republic in 2023 That residency makes it easier to apply for visas to some francophone African countries, giving her more straightforward access to parts of West Africa and beyond.  On top of that, she has learned to maximise every visa she secures. A UK visa, for example, has taken her not just to England but also to Scotland, Montenegro, Albania, Jersey and even as far as Mexico, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Bahamas, destinations many Nigerians do not realise are accessible with that single sticker in their passports. “People don’t know the access is that broad,” said Amaku. “That’s why I still apply even after denials; I hate the documentation, but I love what the access lets me do.” Building this life required money, earned slowly, then all at once. Before social media became her full-time lane, she worked in publishing and then in corporate communications, running a small hair business on the side and quietly gaining a reputation for being good at social media. When the COVID-19 lockdown hit in 2020, the demand for online creators exploded, and so did her workload. At the time, she was the head of corporate communications at a home automation company, but referrals continued to pour in for her to handle social media and content for small brands. By mid-lockdown, she was working three roles from her bedroom in Lagos: attending corporate communications, contracting as a social media manager and content creator for a fintech, and managing social media for a fashion business, all while running her hair brand. “At some point in 2020, I was earning three salaries and living at home,” said Amaku. “I wasn’t paying rent or spending on food, so after the grind and the exhaustion, I looked up and realised I had this financial buffer—and that’s when I started travelling.” Those months built more than savings; they built credibility. Every campaign, every brand recommendation, every successful experiment with social content made it easier for future employers and clients to trust her, which, in turn, made it easier to insist on remote or flexible work. Today, she leads social media and marketing efforts for a Nigerian fintech unicorn in a largely remote role, with occasional in-person time in Lagos during event-heavy seasons. “Marketing is mostly online now,” said Amaku. “I can press go on a campaign here in Germany, and it starts converting in Lagos; I don’t have to be there except during event season.” That flexibility is what lets her line up flights with classes, work calls, and group trips for the travel business she co-founded in 2022 after a trip to