13 The AU Continental Tourism Strategy 2030 began with a single sentence, signed by tourism ministers in Nairobi in October 2018: Africa should become the preferred tourism destination in the world. At that same meeting, then-UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili told delegates the continent should expect 134 million international arrivals by 2030. Seven years on, roughly 81.3 million tourists arrived across Africa in 2025, up from 75.4 million a year earlier, according to data from an Africa Press report of 2026. Growth beat the global rate twice over. It still leaves Africa at little more than 60% of the number its own ministers set as the bar. What the AU Continental Tourism Strategy 2030 Promised African Union heads of state built the tourism ambition into Agenda 2063, the Union’s fifty-year development blueprint, and gave it operational form through the African Tourism Strategic Framework 2019–2028. That framework set two headline targets: doubling intra-regional tourism from 2013 levels and increasing tourism’s real contribution to GDP by 100%, both by 2023, according to Tralac’s summary of the African Union executive summary of 2019. Kenya’s then Cabinet Secretary for Tourism, Najib Balala, told the 2018 Nairobi meeting that the continent’s tourism assets, from Victoria Falls to the wildebeest migration through the Maasai Mara, justified those numbers. The year 2023 has already passed. The Union has not published a scorecard confirming whether either target was met, and independent arrival figures suggest neither was. UN Tourism’s parallel Agenda for Africa, drafted in the same period, named the same five blockages: weak infrastructure, poor air connectivity, restrictive visas, safety perceptions and underdeveloped human capital. Both documents diagnosed the problem correctly. Neither attached a budget line or an enforcement mechanism sufficient to cure it. Borders Still Charge Admission Visa policy is where the strategy’s credibility is tested first, because a tourist cannot spend money in a country they cannot enter. The African Union’s own Visa Openness Index found that 28% of intra-African travel was visa-free in 2024, up from just 20% in 2016, while 47% of trips still required a visa arranged before departure, according to the African Development Bank and African Union report of November 2024. Only four countries, Rwanda, Benin, The Gambia and Seychelles, had scrapped visa requirements for every fellow African traveller by then. Dr Albert Muchanga, the AU’s Commissioner for Economic Development, Trade, Industry and Mining, put the tension plainly: “Balancing security with inclusivity remains a challenge,” according to an African Union Commission, cited in Skinfully Booked, November 2024. The 2025 edition of the index recorded the first reversal in nearly a decade, with the share of journeys requiring a visa arranged in advance climbing from 47.1% to 51.1%. Kenya illustrates the pattern. It replaced its visa system with an electronic travel authorisation in 2024, then drew criticism for charging a $30 fee and narrowing its exemption list, reform on paper, friction in practice. Intra-African trade, the economic activity tourism is meant to sit alongside, still sits below 16%, compared with more than 60% inside the European Union. A continental tourism strategy cannot outrun a continent’s own border policy. ALSO READ: The Africa First-Timer’s Planning Guide: What to Book Early, What to Leave Flexible, and What Everyone Gets Wrong Air France vs Ethiopian Airlines vs Kenya Airways: Best Airline for Connecting Through Africa ECOWAS Single Currency Delays and What They Mean for Cross-Border Travel The Sky Is Not Yet Open Open skies were meant to be the strategy’s engine, and the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) is the flagship project meant to deliver it. Thirty-eight of Africa’s fifty-four states had signed on by 2025, representing more than 80% of the continent’s aviation market, according to a 2025 report by Addis Insight. Yet only around 20% of African air traffic actually flies within the continent, a figure that has barely shifted since SAATM launched in 2018, according to International Airport Review of 2025. By mid-2026, the initiative supported 124 routes flown by 113 airlines and an estimated 8.1 million aviation-linked jobs, worth more than $75 billion in economic output. Those numbers describe potential rather than delivery: signing a commitment and lifting a bilateral restriction are different acts, and only 26 of the 38 signatories had gone as far as a Memorandum of Implementation by mid-2026. The African Union tried to close the financing gap in October 2025, announcing a $30 billion plan to modernise aviation infrastructure across the continent, fronted by Infrastructure and Energy Commissioner Amani Abou-Zeid Mataboge. Whether that capital materialises, and on what terms, will say more about the strategy’s 2030 prospects than any further round of signatures. Where the Numbers Do Move None of this means the strategy has produced nothing. Thirty-nine of Africa’s fifty-four countries have raised their visa openness scores since 2016, and seventeen improved in 2024 alone. Arrivals grew 8% in 2025, more than double the global rate, even against a backdrop of rising fuel costs and airline capacity cuts. According to a recent report by Ecofin Agency, individual member states are also setting national targets that, if achieved, would carry the continental figure with them: South Africa reaffirmed at Africa’s Travel Indaba in May 2026 that it intends to grow annual arrivals from 10.5 million in 2025 to 15 million by 2030, with tourism contributing 10% of national GDP. That single-country ambition is nearly the size of the entire continent’s shortfall against the AU’s 134-million target. It suggests the raw demand for African travel exists. What is missing is coordination that turns fifty-four national plans into one continental outcome. The RCA Argument Beyond the Pipe Dream: Fixing the AU Continental Tourism Strategy 2030 Turning the 2030 ambition into more than a slogan requires four shifts the African Union has so far avoided making. First, ratification has to mean something. The AU Protocol on Free Movement of Persons remains unratified by most member states years after adoption, and until governmen. Until the sovereignty cost of losing visa revenue is recognised, reform will move at the pace of the slowest holdout rather than the fastest reformer. Second, SAATM needs enforcement, not just signatures. A Memorandum of Implementation should be a precondition for continued participation in AU tourism financing, not an optional next step that 26 of 38 members have taken years to reach. Third, the $30 billion aviation infrastructure plan announced in October 2025 needs a public disbursement schedule and named projects, because a continent that has heard large figures attached to transport promises before will not treat this one differently without evidence. Fourth, the AU needs to publish its own scorecard against the 2019–2028 framework’s targets, including the missed 2023 deadline, rather than let outside researchers and journalists reconstruct performance from scattered reports. A strategy that cannot report its own failures honestly will struggle to correct them. None of this is beyond Africa’s institutional capacity. The AfCFTA secretariat already tracks trade-facilitation compliance country by country; a comparable tourism and mobility scorecard, published annually alongside the Visa Openness Index, would apply the same public pressure that has already pushed forty-two countries to widen visa-free access to at least five neighbours. The tools exist. What is missing is the political will to use them at the pace the 2030 deadline demands. The next AU Tourism Ministers’ meeting will likely produce another communiqué praising the continent’s potential. The question worth putting to them before they sign it is not whether Africa can raise its arrival numbers; the 2025 growth rate says it can. It is whether any single member state is willing to accept short-term visa revenue losses or bilateral air-service concessions for the sake of a continental market that no one country controls alone. Until that question gets an honest answer, the 2030 target will remain what it has been since 2018: a number the continent agrees on collectively and undermines individually. The African Union’s tourism strategy will keep missing its own targets for one structural reason: it treats tourism as a marketing campaign when the arrival numbers show it is a mobility and financing problem. Every AU communiqué since 2018 has repeated the same aspiration language, competitiveness, an African brand, a preferred destination, while the two policies that actually move tourists across borders, visa reform and open skies, have advanced at a pace a spreadsheet would call incremental. What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sectors The gap between promise and delivery lands differently depending on where a country sits in the continental pecking order. For destinations that already draw strong independent demand, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, a slow-moving continental strategy is an inconvenience rather than a threat; they can hit national targets largely on their own marketing and air access deals. For Nigeria, the calculation is sharper. Nigeria’s tourism sector has never been driven primarily by leisure arrivals; it runs on aviation connectivity, diaspora travel, and its outsized cultural exports, particularly Afrobeats and Nollywood. A functioning SAATM would matter more to Lagos and Abuja than a marketing campaign, because Nigerian carriers currently compete for regional routes against better-capitalised rivals from Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa. Every year SAATM implementation stalls, Nigeria loses ground on establishing itself as a West African aviation hub rather than a market flown over on the way to one. On visas, Nigeria has moved faster than the AU average; its e-visa and visa-on-arrival policies for African nationals rank among the more open on the continent, but that openness only pays off commercially if neighbouring markets reciprocate and if intra-African air capacity exists to carry the resulting demand. A stronger, better-financed continental strategy would not just add visitor numbers; it would give Nigerian tourism operators, airlines and cultural exporters a bigger, more connected market to sell into, rather than fifty-four fragmented ones. Africa’s tourism story is bigger than one strategy document. Explore more RCA investigations into the policies, routes and reforms shaping how the continent moves, and decide for yourself who is delivering and who is still promising. FAQs What is the AU Continental Tourism Strategy 2030? It refers to the African Union’s tourism ambition, anchored in Agenda 2063 and the African Tourism Strategic Framework 2019–2028, which set out to make Africa “the preferred tourism destination in the world” and host roughly 134 million international arrivals by 2030. How many tourists actually visited Africa in 2025? About 81.3 million, up from 75.4 million in 2024, growth of roughly 8%, more than double the global average, but still well short of the 134 million target set for 2030. Has visa-free travel improved across Africa? Only modestly. Visa-free intra-African travel rose from 20% in 2016 to 28% in 2024, but the 2025 index recorded a reversal, with the share of trips needing a visa arranged in advance climbing past 51%. What is SAATM, and has it worked? The Single African Air Transport Market is the AU’s open-skies initiative. Thirty-eight countries had joined by 2025, but only about 20% of African air traffic remains within the continent, showing signatures have outpaced actual implementation. What would make the 2030 tourism strategy succeed? Ratifying the AU Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, converting SAATM commitments into enforced implementation, publishing a transparent scorecard against the strategy’s own targets, and giving the newly announced $30 billion aviation financing plan a public disbursement timeline. African TourismAfrican UnionAgenda 2063tourism policy 0 comment 0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinTelegramEmail Oluwafemi Kehinde Oluwafemi Kehinde is a business and technology correspondent and an integrated marketing communications enthusiast with close to a decade of experience in content and copywriting. He currently works as an SEO specialist and a content writer at Rex Clarke Adventures. Throughout his career, he has dabbled in various spheres, including stock market reportage and SaaS writing. He also works as a social media manager for several companies. He holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication and majored in public relations.