Time for a shift: African countries must claim their share of the global conferences economy

On Jun 10, 2026

President Cyril Ramaphosa arrives at Indaba.

The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) has taken years to return to Africa. Unfazed by the irony, the association is blowing its trumpet, giving itself brownie points, for taking its 66th congress to Africa, in Kigali in October 2027.

Business events are the hilly city’s staple. So, the news is nothing special. Had the Rwandan capital wanted to, given a chance, it could have easily hosted any two editions of that congress – congregating about 1,500 people – since the end of COVID-19. This underlines the teeming compact city’s state of readiness.

In fact, the continent has plenty in that category. Look at Kampala, Accra and Abidjan. Add Lagos, Luanda and Johannesburg to the list. Thus, instead of ICCA lauding itself for shunning Africa for a quarter of a century, it should concede its bias. Only then can it talk about affirming previously-excluded communities or regions. This extends to any corporate citizen. Thus far, the association takes multiple editions of its congress to Europe each decade. That is wrong but it helps by way of branding Europe. Going to Kigali in 2027 is right but not a favour. Also, why did ICCA make its first trip to Africa, Cape Town in that case, in 2004? Expect no explanation.

Keeping to the Great Lakes, aviation analyst and publisher Derek Nseko dissects Uganda’s reality. “International conference activity is rising,” he notes. “The tourism product is diversifying beyond wildlife alone. The MICE conversation is gaining maturity. Even the tone of policy discussions feels more commercially aware than it did several years ago.”

Nseko, a pilot with many hats, was a panellist at the Pearl of Africa Tourism Expo (Poate). The expo – held in a lakeside town named Munyonyo, a few miles north of the equator – in turn congregates tour operators, artists, hoteliers and investors from 40-odd countries to sample Uganda’s infrastructure, natural beauty and other aspects. “The energy felt larger. More confident. More commercially aware. More urgent,” Nseko says, recalling this year’s Poate (pronounced Powateh). The speaker line-up and the agenda were spot on. Discussions extended to topics previously pushed to the margins: film, MICE sector, product development and sustainable tourism. Alas, such discussions often end up in boardrooms. Cue silos and schisms. Time to make the circle bigger. Hence this article. Maybe it’ll reach students and academics at Mbarara, Ibadan, Legon and Rhodes; tour guides in Adawa, Elmina and Kilwa Kisiwani; conference organisers and policy makers in Beijing, Brussels and Juba; tourists in Libreville, Paris and São Paulo; and others.

Kigali boasts a competitive international meetings sector.

This year’s edition of Poate took place under the leadership of Juliana Kagwa, the new CEO at the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB). Her predecessor, Lily Ajarova and her deputy, Bradford Ochieng, stand out for laying a solid foundation. So, the 2026 expo gives Kagwa “a visible first-year win” but also “a first-year leadership examination in full public view,” writes CEO East Africa. “The next test is whether UTB can convert this momentum into sustained demand, higher-value visitors and measurable progress… in tourism inflows.”

The new chief, a highly trained cosmopolitan leader, would do well to oversee a few more new signature international conferences and events to yield thousands of business travellers. Then there’s the deepening of Uganda-EU ties. Also, it’s about time Uganda hosted a global gastronomy festival.

For the record, the conference sector is firing on all cylinders in Africa. Look at the green Kigali and verdant Kampala of many hills or, further afield, Algiers and Brazzaville. Addis Ababa is a premier diplomatic and business meetings hub. Cape Town is the finest venue for academic and business conventions. eSwatini’s spanking new, world-class, ICC will only make the sector even more competitive in Southern Africa. Apart from Nigeria, in a matter of one year, establishing and shutting a standalone tourism ministry, under Lola Ade-John, Africa is looking up.

ICCA’s bias thus takes us to the maths behind GlobeWatch, ranking of host cities. Meetings, incentives, conferences and events, or MICE, drives tourism. The international conferences sector’s business-card effect explains how gatherings brand host nations, subtly turning some business visitors into holidaymakers. The skewed venue choice thus dilutes Africa’s chances. While ICCA ought to be equitable by virtue of its remit, it is yet to close the host-city gap. Pity. What’s worse is that the dearth, or exclusion, of African host cities as meetings venues is widespread.

History-rich Kasubi – World Heritage Site (Kampala).

Even the United Nations props the Global North. For one, Europe will host COP 31, likely to attract 50,000 people, in November. This will be the 15th time that Europe hosts the rotational COP, the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, to Africa’s five times. Rotating events, or the World Cup, has a transformational effect. The recognition of any host city is symbolic but there are also tangible and immediate benefits such as forex. Beyond those points, the sector is well-placed to foster regional collaborations, buoy inter- and intra-trade, and, in the case of COP gatherings, say, raise awareness about issues like drought, rising sea levels and a list of other vulnerabilities.

Still – despite their numeric significance, half a billion people in 20 countries – West and Central Africa regions have never had the opportunity to host the world’s largest climate change conference. Like its southern cousin, East Africa has hosted it once. That brings us back us to the question pondered by delegates at Poate: is Africa missing in action or being overlooked? Ask the UN. Rotation is a throwaway line. If it weren’t, Africa would host no fewer than two COP editions per decade. Added to showcasing host territories even to the millions of people following the event on TV, the business-card effect widened, these events bring a thick slice of GDP. Look at Davos, hosts of the World Economic Forum annual meeting. Davos generates €65-million each January when the WEF meeting swings by in winter. The sum exceeds €100-million when the rest of Switzerland is factored in. As an aside, Swiss media reported, the United States delegation once paid a hotel bill of €390,000, in St Gallen, and signed a €1-million car rental contract. The sums are huge and there is good human-developing legacy.

Global entities, including the UN, known for its inconsistency and uneven distribution of opportunities, must be called out for their tokenisation of Africa. Kampala and Nairobi stand up. Will African leaders from Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwa to King Mohammed VI and their peers in Asia, Europe and beyond take global entities to task?

Let the students in economics, media, politics, science and other fields at Cairo, Makerere, Roma, UCAD, Wits and every other institution also rise and, through tourism-centred diplomacy and economy, build an Africa they want – the land that Thomas Sankara dreamed of.

To tap the realm of possibilities, when will Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, and Senegal bid to host COP? Citizens should be asking governments, academia and the private sector. Has Nairobi and Durban, as previous COP hosts, put their names in the hat of late? Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda or – near the Sahel – Algeria, Nigeria and Cameroon could also do it. If governments are slow or lazy, as they often are, where is the private sector to take charge?

Back to ICCA’s GlobeWatch: had Africa been treated equally, why wouldn’t its cities have claimed a bigger slice of the pie? That, after all, is the metric the surveyors are using. Regardless of the prevailing bias, African nations must double incoming tourist traffic. Bidding for more MICE opportunities is an avenue. East Africa punches below its weight in MICE and leisure categories. At the last count, Uganda tallied 1.3 million tourists, in the league of Ghana and Senegal, according to data collated by the UN World Tourism Organisation. Excepting the likes of Chad and Malawi (a nation prone to very high ministerial turnover) – with each scraping south of a million arrivals – Africa-bound tourist traffic is rising. But that’s off a very low base. Scratch the surface for context.

The Great Wall of China reportedly drew about 15 million people each year to Paris’s 25 million. The latter exceeds the whole of West Africa’s inbound traffic. Africa attracts 80 million per annum – Southern Africa and its northernmost cousin claim big chunks of that. For the bigger picture, look at France’s lively 100 million. Time for a paradigm shift.

Some of these points made it to this year’s Poate, which drew about 2,000 people. If the delegates enjoyed their time they’d be back. Anyway, what’s there not to like about Uganda? But the expo – like Afcon (set to come to East Africa next June) – is a bridge. It’s not a destination.

Government and the private sector must join forces to grow Uganda’s sector: double arrivals for two years in a row, consolidate for another two. Repeat. That’ll bring six million visitors per annum before Kagwa’s fifth anniversary. Diversifying the offering and adding signature meetings will help. Uganda, like some of her peers, underwhelms partly due to lazy and perennial overreliance on wildlife and waterfalls. We haven’t even touched on cuisine, filmmaking or heritage.

To the southernmost tip, in Durban, Africa’s Travel Indaba does the same, at a significantly larger scale, through gathering industry players from across the continent and the globe each year. According to the tourism ministry, almost 10,000 people turned up for Indaba in May. The expo added $51 million in tourism expenditure and sustained 1,100 jobs for the coastal city.

Abroad, WTM London, which calls itself the world’s premier trade show though it’s short on voices from the Global South, congregates nearly 50,000 participants per year. The show adds £200 million ($270 million) to London’s economy and maintains thousands of jobs. Broadly, WTM generates an estimated £2.8 billion in contracts. It is worth reflecting how much each nation realised for their investment.

Taxpayers, from Egypt, Kenya, Uganda and Mali to Ghana, Canada and Japan, must pose such questions lest those events become a cool jaunt for those sent as representatives.

Finally, how much the MICE sector adds to the GDP is the easiest part. What’s more critical, but often left unsaid, is that business events accelerate training, foster regional collaborations, and stimulate various areas of the economy, sometimes across borders. The sector is a PR and branding exercise, a forex earner and a practical catalyst for change, for shared growth. It just has to be used right, make the circle bigger. Time for a shift.

Shoks Mnisi Mzolo