Bayo Adedeji, Group CEO of Wakanow, told a packed hall at the Africa Technology Expo on Friday that Africa’s travel industry remains wide open for any technology company willing to enter it. Adedeji made the comment during a fireside chat titled “The Business of Movement: Can Africa Build a Borderless Travel Economy?” alongside ATE founder and CEO Clinton Nnaemeka, on the opening day of the expo’s two-day run at the National Theatre in Lagos.
The conversation centred on whether Africa can build a genuinely borderless travel economy, a question that sits at the intersection of fintech, logistics, and policy. Adedeji argued that the sector still lacks the depth of technology infrastructure seen in mature travel markets, leaving room for new entrants to build products that solve booking, payments, and verification problems that incumbents have not fully addressed.
He pointed to religious travel as evidence of how large the underserved market actually is. According to Adedeji, Wakanow recorded massive numbers when it began facilitating Hajj and Umrah bookings, and he said Nigeria’s north, despite operating largely through informal channels, generates over a billion naira in religious travel spend. The figure underscores a recurring theme in Nigerian commerce: vast transaction volumes moving through cash-based, undocumented systems that formal players have struggled to capture.
That informality is also the unresolved part of Adedeji’s pitch. Wakanow has spent years building rails for flights, hotels, and visa processing, yet a market this size still runs largely outside its books, and outside the books of any other formal travel-tech operator. Saying the sector is wide open is one thing. Building the trust, agent networks, and payment rails needed to pull a billion-naira informal pilgrimage economy into a digital platform is another.
Policy, Infrastructure, and a Middle East Bet
Pressed on the panel’s central question, whether Africa can actually build a borderless travel economy, Adedeji pointed to three levers: policy, infrastructure, and partnerships that extend beyond the continent’s own borders. On policy, his answer leaned on the same logic that underpins Nigeria’s ECOWAS passport regime, which already grants visa-free movement across 15 West African member states. He framed that kind of regional liberalisation, extended and harmonised across more of the continent, as the policy foundation a borderless travel economy would need.
On infrastructure, Adedeji argued that booking, payments, and verification rails have to mature in step with any policy progress, or visa-free corridors simply move friction from passport control to the platforms travellers are forced to use instead. It is a fair point, though one that also describes the exact gap Wakanow itself has spent years trying to close, and has not yet fully closed, in markets it already operates in.
The more concrete thread was partnerships outside Africa. Adedeji said Wakanow is actively partnering with brands beyond the continent’s shores, citing relationships in the Middle East as an example of how Wakanow is positioning religious and leisure travel demand toward partners who already have the infrastructure, route networks, and liquidity that African operators are still building. For a company that built its early reputation on Hajj and Umrah logistics, a Middle East tie-up is a logical extension rather than a leap, and it gives Wakanow a route to capture demand on both ends of the journey rather than just the outbound leg from Nigeria.
Whether that combination, regional policy harmonisation, deeper local infrastructure, and outbound partnerships with Gulf operators, adds up to a genuinely borderless travel economy is still an open bet. But it is a more substantive answer than rhetoric about an open market, and it gives Wakanow’s borderless thesis an actual shape: less about Africans moving freely within Africa in the near term, and more about Africa’s travel demand, formal and informal, plugging into infrastructure that already exists elsewhere.
A Bigger Stage Than Previous Editions
Beyond the fireside chat, ATE’s opening day carried an energetic, almost festival-like atmosphere, with attendees splitting time between the main conference halls and a busy exhibition floor.
This year’s edition is also a noticeably different production from the one before it. ATE 2025, the expo’s third edition, ran as a single day at the Landmark Event Center on Lagos’s Victoria Island and drew more than 4,000 attendees from over 15 countries. ATE 2026 has expanded to a full two-day format and moved to the National Theatre in Lagos, a larger and more historically significant venue that signals organisers are betting on sustained growth rather than a one-off spike in attendance. The expo is targeting up to $890 million in potential partnerships, investments, and enterprise contracts across this year’s run, according to organisers, a target that would mark a meaningful step up from previous editions if it materialises.
A separate startup pitch session, sponsored by crypto platform Breet and coordinated by Eliezer Ajah, ran alongside the main stage programming. ATE’s pitch tracks have previously produced notable winners. Nigerian customer engagement startup Bunce took the Pitch Battleground crown at ATE 2024, and this year’s Breet-backed session is positioned to extend that track record for early-stage founders working in fintech and crypto rails.
Travel-tech is not new territory for Africa’s startup pipeline. Kenya’s Triply, which is building what its founders call an operating system for African travel businesses, joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch on the strength of a similar thesis: that travel operators across the continent are underserved by existing booking and payments infrastructure. Whether ATE’s 2026 cohort produces a company at that scale, or whether Wakanow’s incumbent advantage proves harder to dislodge than Adedeji suggested, will be one of the more interesting threads to track as the expo’s second day, and the rest of the year, unfolds.
ATE 2026 continues Saturday with further keynote sessions, masterclasses, and matchmaking activity across the exhibition floor.
